


Ghosts, Gardens, and a Certain Time

by powercorruptionlies



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Armageddon, F/M, Fluff, M/M, Smut, Strangers to Lovers, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:20:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 47,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24219547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/powercorruptionlies/pseuds/powercorruptionlies
Summary: Hell's most fanatical demon betrays Hell in quite a spectacular fashion, pandemonium ensues.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens), Beelzebub/Gabriel (Good Omens), Hastur (Good Omens)/Original Female Character(s), Hastur (Good Omens)/Reader
Comments: 6
Kudos: 19





	1. I Am So Lonely, and You Need a Rescue

A white rabbit on the first of the month was good luck. Supposedly. The thing was, it was already the thirtieth of the month, and, having seen a white rabbit whilst on a walk thirty days ago, nothing, not a single thing, had gone anywhere near ‘luck’.

Laoise sat down on the couch, newly fired from the pub. The shame is made worse by the fact that she had gotten fired by the same person that slept in the cellar of said pub, and that said pub backed onto a graveyard, and subsequently had shocking Yelp reviews.

Haunted – ★☆☆☆☆

Smells dead - ★★☆☆☆ (she liked to think that her charm had given it that rare second star)

Groundskeeper in the tatty mackintosh is creepy as fuck – has no business stopping in for a drink. - ☆☆☆☆☆

Screaming heard from the basement - ★☆☆☆☆

The last one always made her smile. The screaming from the basement was not, in fact, a ghoul or a demon or any other insidious fantasy – it was just Benny finishing the tax returns; or realising that Lloyd had ordered the wrong kind of liquor that month. If only the customers knew, they might be entertained by it, too.

Well, now it’s not my problem, she reasoned with herself. Though, she would miss Max, the slightly unhinged aforementioned groundskeeper of the graveyard who had always called her ‘pet’ in a heavy Newcastle drawl and tipped her nicely. She thought his mackintosh was perfectly fine. Laoise wondered what somebody who had an issue with a tattered and greyed mackintosh was doing in a pub bordering on a graveyard, anyway.

However – that day was just one day among many that had gone wrong that April. It would’ve taken her years to explain every detail, but her highlights were:

\- Offended mum, thrice (1st, 11th, 15th – still not speaking to me)

\- Got asked ‘what’re you looking at?’ by a rather audacious mum and daughter who were, in fact, the ones turning around and looking at me (13th)

\- Aired by two guys on Tinder (7th, 14th)

\- Aired a guy on Tinder, got a death threat (16th)

\- Dad got upset that I didn’t make enough dinner, made exactly the same as mum usually makes, sulkily made me leave early and walk home in the hail (19th)

\- Made odd friend on the bus who threw a lipstick at me when I tried to get off, called me manipulative (23rd)

\- Forgot to cancel monthly subscription for the theatre (28th) 

\- The withdrawal of £8.99 from my account subsequently left me 90p short for my order at New Look (29th)

\- Got fired (30th)

All low-level irritations, sure, but built up over the course of four weeks (and some having lasting effects that just made all the rest that much more unbearable) had made April, well… unbearable.

Against her better judgement, having been threatened with a ‘good old stabbing’ when she’d ignored Mac on Tinder, she blanked the nightly slew of calls and texts from her friends, their group-chats, her family’s group-chat. It was all just complaining about helicopter bosses and getting their lunch stolen and that one co-worker that just won’t stop with the stupid problems, at the jobs that they still had. Laoise told herself not to be bitter. It had just been income to her. She’d only taken it because it was a lunch shift and then she could come home and work towards that ever-promising, lucrative career of amateur artistry.

She was going to make it someday. Benny was going to be sorry for firing her; if they’d left it on good terms, she may have donated some money to the pub when she eventually made it into prestigious art galleries like in New York, or Amsterdam. Benny might’ve even been able to buy out the pub on the high street and rebrand it, making _The Inferno 2.0_ , sans cemetery.

Ah, well. He was the one losing out here.

Except, she didn’t have a job anymore.

And the fridge was empty.

And she never ordered enough food at the takeout to be rid of the small-order fee.

Fuck.

After having a hearty sob whilst naked on her bathroom floor with the shower slowly running out of hot water, she once again loitered in the kitchen, this time in her joggers and a Superdry jumper that had belonged to an old boyfriend. She swings around on the cabinet doors, looking for something worthwhile to eat. Crackers? No, too dry. Can’t be bothered to boil water for spaghetti. It’s socially unacceptable to eat digestives for dinner. Oh, that’s gone off. Stale. Stale, stale, stale, stale…

Minutes later she sat in front of the news with a bowl of cereal on her lap, checking her phone. She wanted to do something fun, something worthwhile. The lists compiled by other people on the internet were always boring and a bit wet, never seeming to have any thrill value.

Then she remembered: there’s that Ouija board in the attic.

This is stupid, she thought, pulling down the stairs to the attic. This won’t even work, she thought, crawling into the short room that smelt of oppressive warmth and fibreglass. This is such a waste of my time, she thought, finding the box – distributed 1983 – and scrubbing a hand over the thick layer of dust. I really should be making art, she thought, climbing down from the loft and settling the board on her bedroom carpet.

Laoise took a deep breath and let it out, scattering more of the dust (dead skin, she’d vaguely thought). She pinched the planchette between her forefinger and little finger, turning it over in the warm light of her bedroom overhead. Her mum had told her that when she’d done this at her painfully haunted boarding school in 1985, nothing had happened, probably owing to the fact that the grounds of the school were already booked up with as many odious spirits as it could be.

Fuck it, she whispered, biting down on her lip. Her stomach growled faintly. She placed the planchette in the middle of the board, gently, every so often glancing at the instructions in her peripheral vision.

‘Hey,’ she tried pathetically. Was ‘hey’ too colloquial for millenniums old spirits? Possibly.

‘Hello? Any… spirits? Oh, God, do I need candles? I need candles, don’t I?’

Unfortunately for Laoise, she’d given away her stockpiled sets of Yankee Candles to her friends at Christmas. Anyway, she imagined that a demon wouldn’t take to scents such as _pink sands_ or _angel wings_.

She muttered expletives under her breath as uneventful minute after uneventful minute passed, watching the sky through the window above her change from orange woven with lilac to the palest blue to the deep, imposing navy of the night, cut through with the ochre squares of neighbours’ windows.

As she contemplated the artistry of the sky, a tug comes at her hands. She whipped her head back to the board in shock, hurting her neck with the force. Her mouth hung open ever so slightly, her breathing growing more panicked and arrhythmic.

The hole of the planchette singles out the H, engraved elegantly in thick black lettering. Just as harshly as it had yanked her forward, the planchette – or whatever held it with her – threw her back until it centred on the board again.

‘What the fuck,’ she asked the air, yet not taking her hands from the pointer. This had been what she’d wanted: excitement, thrill. Albeit, this had the potential to bring her more than she’d bargained for.

And that it did.

For a while longer, nothing happened. Her body shook, only a slight vibration, and her chest felt warm and heavy, like the feeling you get when you know you have to do something unpleasant. She buckled her fingers as if posturing to play the piano, pursing them on the splintering surface of the planchette and pushing herself away to fall back on the palms of her hands. She looked up. No lights flickered. No curtains flapped or twitched without the wind to invigorate them. The room remained a stuffy 22 degrees.

‘Another dead end,’ she said aloud, scowling down at the board and considering this endeavour yet another disappointment of April. ‘Can’t even get the unforgivable to entertain me.’

Downstairs again, the TV plays on mute, casting a painfully bright blue light into the monochrome grey room – hadn’t I turned that off? - she thought to herself. Laoise struggled with a bottle of red, her hands coated with a thin layer of sweat from the remnant nerves of earlier. Looking to her left, she wrinkled her nose at the few remaining cereal in the bowl that had absorbed most of the milk and denatured like bodily enzymes. She pushed it to the side table, growing squeamish at the thought of the soggy mess. The light from the TV seemed to grow in its luminesce and, when Laoise fluttered her eyes away from the bottle to examine it, she swore she could see each individual pixel flickering with the news caster’s movements.

She shut her eyes and rolled them behind their sockets, easing the stinging she felt as well as erasing any tiredness that was making the brightness worse. It was stress, she told herself, feeling the wine stain her lips and linger there even after she’d swiped at it with her the back of her hand.

The TV shut off.

Then turned back on.

Then switched from Channel 4 to National Geographic.

The couch cushion beside her depressed with a new weight, and a shadow a few inches taller than herself cast itself over her. Her eyes widened, the grip on the bottleneck tightened, dangerously close to shattering the deep green glass.

‘How the heaven did you summon me?’

The light grey couch was now certainly stained red, the bottle now out of her grasp lain half-empty on her carpet (also equally stained).

‘Je- _sus_.’

‘Guess again. Also, if I’m going to be here, I need to not be hearing any Heavenly jargon.’

She swallowed, the after taste of the wine bitter and not half as pleasant as it had tasted when initially swirled around her tongue. She hazarded a quick glance to the side but her eyes lingered on the form next to her. Slender. Tall. Long extremities. Fingers gripped loose black trousers either out of frustration or nerves. His pale face (covered partly by rather fair hair, though for lack of any real light in the room she could not tell whether it was blond or strictly white) was riddled with odd, dark bumps. His eyes – well. That was a little harder to discern. It didn’t quite seem real.

‘W-who the hell – ‘

‘Language.’

‘- are you?’

The man sighed. With a snap of his fingers, the TV went black and every light in the room – the three table lamps, all six overhead bulbs – flashed on. She could see him clearly now. White-blonde hair which looked ever so slightly as if it were synthetic. The dark bumps were almost certainly warts. His skin overall pale and green-ish beneath the dirt adorning the gaunt and tired face.

And the eyes. Pure black. Only thin slits of white displayed either side of the huge, coal irises. ‘Hastur. Duke of Hell.’

‘Duke…’

‘’s what I just said.’

She rolled her lip between her teeth. She tried shutting her eyes again, convinced that it was still just an effect of stress or inebriation, but they were soon forced open against her will. ‘What the fuck…’

‘You’re the one who summoned me. Why’re you looking away? I find it highly disrespectful.’ He gave a loaded glance toward the TV. ‘Also, that you had that… thing on. Whatever it is, it garners a lot of attention.’

‘The TV?’

Hastur shuddered at the name, souring his expression further. ‘Ugh, the television. Another Crowley-ism. His excuse for sloth…’

Whoever Crowley is, he had done a good job with the TV if he were aiming for sloth, she thought, trying to normalise this situation with casual, mundane consderations.

The room fell silent. The ticking of the clock on the mantel piece grew louder and louder the longer the pair kept their lips sealed.

‘Why did you summon me? I was doing paperwork.’

‘Paperwork? In Hell? Is this a joke? How the h- _fuck_ – did you get in my house?’

Hastur looked perplexed. ‘Joke? What joke? I don’t do jokes. Don’t like them. Swallowed the tongues of jesters in the… I don’t know… 16th century, I think. Still do,’ he smiled, appearing, to Laoise at least, to be making a joke of his own. His face falls again. ‘Hey. You summoned me. Don’t act as if I’m an unwelcome visitor. It’s rude.’

‘Sorry, Duke.’

His mouth breaks open into a humourless grin, one riddled with a hungry pride. Duke, she noted, remember to call him Duke.

‘Lovely manners. ‘Your Disgrace’ is welcome, too.’

‘How about Hastur?’

He clenched and unclenched his fist, looking as if he were about to bring his knuckles to his strangely sharp teeth. He stopped himself, splaying them out around his narrow thigh before tilting his head to the side as if in thought. ‘Possibly. We’ll see how we go.’

Laoise realised only then that she needed a reason, and probably a better one than the truth, as to why she’d summoned him. She hadn’t summoned Hastur in particular, she didn’t even know that Hell had a Hastur. She also figured that demons would probably rather that humans stayed lonely than go looking for company – bad things, evil things, cruel things, were born out of loneliness.

‘I summoned you because… oh, I don’t know…’

‘Do you need revenge? Sex? Because if you need sex, I’d sooner send for an incubus. Not my department.’

‘I was lonely.’

‘Oh, grief…’ he muttered. He raised a long arm clad in a tattered and muddied trench coat, fingers poised to snap.

‘Wait! Don’t go. I mean… I didn’t mean lonely as in, you know, needing sex. Necessarily’

He lowered his arm an iota, separating his fingers again. ‘Then what? I’m not here for… well…’ he faltered midsentence, turning his body to regard her wholly. He groaned as if in annoyance at having remembered something he’d rather stayed forgotten. ‘I suppose I could be here for _that_.’

‘What?’

‘ _A nice chat_ ,’ he said in a nasally, mocking tone. To settle him, she laughed, somewhat unconvincingly.

‘Nothing that soft, if your Disgrace wouldn’t like it.’

She swore she saw a smile twitch upon his thin lips.

‘Drink?’ She hazarded, leaning down to pick up the half-wasted wine bottle.

‘Fine,’ he agreed, extending his arm to take the bottle without further conversation. With a swig, he had sucked down near half of it. 

'You drink well.’

‘I’ve been around for 6000 years, and counting. I should hope so.’

Laoise nodded, crossing her legs beneath her and shifting to face Hastur full on, leaning against the cushion to get a better look at his face. He wasn’t… bad looking.

‘What.’

‘Just looking at you.’

‘Why?’

‘You’re sort of nice to look at.’

‘Ugh, are you drunk? You’re drunk. You humans get drunk off of air, I tell you.’

‘Possibly. I still think you’re nice looking, though.’

Hastur flapped around, clumsily slamming the wine bottle onto the coffee table, near shattering it. ‘Shut up,’ he said, though it was more like phonetic breathing. He scratched the back of his head, trying to glare at her beneath the thick strands of hair that hung sparsely in front of his forehead. ‘I’m a demon, I’m not supposed to look nice.’

‘And yet, you do.’

She was pushing her luck and she knew it. Ripping tongues from jesters for jokes – what could he do to her for a compliment?

Yes, what _could_ he do to her?

She banished the thought. He was a demon. Any actual appeal was negated by that slight oversight, and the odd smell and the bad skin. That, as well as the fact that this likely wasn’t happening, she'd concluded - 

\- she’d concluded, until he reached out for the bottle once more, handing it back to her, their fingers grazing the others’ in the clumsy hand over. They felt rough, impossibly cold; gritty, maybe? She tensed her body to keep from shivering, all too conscious of any ‘rudeness’. Giving a weak smile that dissolved into the rest of her face, she tipped the bottle at him as if in toast and downed what she hoped was half as much as he’d managed.

‘I’ve got competition.’

‘I worked at a pub. I should hope so.’

The corners of his mouth twitched once more, albeit noncommittally. He demanded the bottle back by extending his palm sharply at her.

‘Yes, sir,’ she flirted, rolling her eyes at her own desperate behaviour as soon as his eyes were closed and head tipped back against the rim of the bottle.

He wiped his lips clean (or, back to their original dusty state) with an aggressive swipe of the hand. The wine was gone, neither had much to say, and the light that swallowed the whole room left her nowhere to hide.

‘Are you satisfied with your summoning?’ He eventually investigated, a conclusory tone in his voice. She struggled for a response, not wanting him to leave her just yet. Would she ever want him to leave? It felt like not, at the time.

‘No! No. I mean, I’m satisfied, but I still feel… alone. Empty. I need to be filled.’ She winced. I did not police my phrasing of that sentence nearly enough, she lamented in her mind.

Hastur didn’t give much by way of disgust, amusement, or even acknowledgement at her wording. All he mustered was a shrug, settling back against the arm of the couch and staring her down expectantly. This made her hot. It made her itch. Her body prickled and shivered. This was wrong, she knew it on a carnal level, but, on an equally primitive level, it was _so damn exciting_. He scratched his face and looked detachedly around the room, not seeming terribly approving of, or intrigued by, anything.

‘Well?’

‘Well.’

‘How might I fill the void?’

‘I have a few ideas.’

Hastur groaned. ‘Fine. Entertain me. You might be capable of a good idea.’

‘…Right. Okay. So, we could keep talking.’

Hastur rolled his shoulders back, frustrated.

‘Didn’t think so. I could go find more alcohol, and we could get extraordinarily drunk - as I usually do.’

‘Warmer.’

‘Or…’

‘Or? Get on with it.’

‘You could try your hand at – ‘

She let her words linger, gauging his mood and how well this would likely go down. ‘Being an incubus?’

In the moments following her suggestion, Laoise hit two personal records in her life: the longest three seconds, ever; and witnessing the most variegated face-journey, ever. She felt ill, the viscous, bitter wine creeping its way back through her throat, wrapped in bile. Was it the end for her? So soon? Was her last word really to be ‘incubus’?

Hastur’s face neutralised, his eyes widening and the creases around his wound-up mouth flattening out. He fluttered his hands around himself, as if looking for words to pluck out of the air, before curling his knuckles into the cushion and propelling himself closer, nearly falling atop her. The sudden movement made her jump, throwing her hands to her chest in defence.

‘Fine. Now, don’t tell,’ he said disingenuously, satirizing. ‘But I’ve never done this before.’

‘Not even with another demon?’

He looked off to the side, looking put out. ‘Nothing worth it, not down there.’ He paused (looking down between her legs, she noted) and jabbed a finger towards the ceiling. ‘Not up there, either.’

Laoise nods, quickly.

‘So, where do we start?’

Gaining composure, she flushed her chest to his own, attempting to gain somewhat of an upper hand (something that seemed impossible, considering Hastur’s developing repertoire of powers, threats, and torture methods).

‘The bedroom’s always a nice place.’

*

Stiffly, Hastur perched on the edge of her bed, playing with loose threads on his trench coat. Before attending to him, she touched herself up in the bathroom mirror, hands hovering above the neckline of her jumper while debating whether to strip off or not. She left the bathroom in her joggers and black bralette.

Taking one look at her, he immediately snapped his head away, pulling at his tartan scarf, which was the only part of his clothing that he’d somewhat bothered to remove; instead of tucked tightly into the coat, it hung loose around his shoulders, both ends curled up in his lap. So much for lust, she noted.

Placing herself directly in front of him to encompass his field of vision, she jutted her hips forward and took his jaw between her fingers, using the grip to tilt his thin face up towards hers. She kissed him, easing into it at first, going slow as to allow him to mimic the movements and grooves of her lips. While his mouth remained sedentary for longer than she would’ve liked, he eventually reciprocated with chapped lips manoeuvring around hers, accentuating his newly-learnt skill by gripping her cheeks between both of his hand and using the hold on her to pull her on top of him. As she landed on his lap, neither of their lips letting go of the others’, she laughed airily into the kiss, snaking her arms up his own and landing upon his shoulders. He leant hard into the kiss, hungry and greedy for her, thrusting her back against him each time she tried to come up for air. In her own opinion, not that she’d ever had a run in with incubi/succubae, something about this felt a little more intimate than the regular demonic prostitution service.

Equally, Hastur wasn’t an incubus.

‘Ha-Hastur, I need to breathe,’ she said, managing to push away, not without resistance from Hastur’s hands that fanned across her entire lower back and him biting down roughly onto her lips. She panted, a dull throb coming from between her legs as she felt a bruising pain develop on her lips and just how sexy it had been that he’d known to bite her.

‘Fine,’ Hastur conceded, resting his head on her shoulder to instead bite and suck on her neck. Throwing her head sideways to shimmy her hair out of his way, she fumbled around with his trench coat in an attempt to strip him down as she was.

‘Can you take this thing off? I get more out of it if I can pleasure you, too.’

‘An incubus’ job is to pleasure – ‘

‘You aren’t an incubus. Rules don’t apply. Off with it.’

Begrudgingly, he untied the belt of the coat and slid the scarf off from around his neck. The outerwear lay discarded on the floor at the foot of her bed, leaving Hastur in a dishevelled button-up, with the first three buttons gaping open, messy tie slung around the collar.

‘Better?’

‘Yes, your Disgrace.’

Hastur smiled, setting a hard grip on her hair and pulling her face down to his to kiss her once more. You’re enjoying this, she allowed herself to think, indulgently. Using her weight to push the demon flat to the bed, she straddled him by his narrow hips and attempted to undo his tie and his shirt while keeping her tongue sliding against his own. In response, ten calloused fingertips lift the halter-neck of her bra over her head, sending her breasts loping out of the undefined, black lace cups.

‘Wow,’ he breathed. Suddenly, kissing wasn’t Hastur’s prerogative. ‘Don’t get these in Hell.’

‘What?’

‘No use for them. If they so wanted, someone could have them, but… oh, why am I talking about this? Come here,’ he implored, hands sliding down from her neck to her ribs to her waist, aligning his mouth with her chest.

‘Please,’ she hummed, Hastur grinning wickedly at her nipples, letting nothing but tension wrap around them. ‘Please.’

‘What do I do with them?’

‘Oh, as if you can’t figure it out. You’re a demon! Don’t you have infinite – oh.’ In seconds, Hastur’s tongue flicks against her nipple, sharper-than-normal teeth clamping down on the firm tissue far too hard, but the pain was barely registering past the barrier of her euphoria. Her forehead planted itself in the ripples of her clean duvet, body already too tired and wrought with an overload of long-desired pleasure to hold herself up.

‘That’s fucking fantastic.’

Getting a second wave, she reanimated herself long enough to paw at the fly of his loose-fitting black trousers, desperate to feel something of his own. The comment about demonic breasts had thrown her off – if there was no need for breasts, did the same apply to demonic dick? She could only acquire her own empirical evidence.

‘What’re you doing?’ Hastur panicked, pulling away from her body, arms positioned conveniently above his head. She sat up straight across his hips, pinning his wrists together above the crown of his fair hair.

‘Helping you. Don’t you want any?’

He recoiled his head, staring balefully at the headboard. The longer he took to respond, the harder she gripped his wrists.

‘’Spose.’

‘Good boy.’

Alarmingly, the world rolled around before her eyes. Now she was below him, mirroring the compromising position she’d just held him in. His nose brushed hers, giving her a better view at the strip of black warts that climbed the skin around it. Their eyes were so close they blended into one.

‘Never, _ever_ , call me something so infantile.’ His tone, and the grin, betrayed his words.

Still disbelieving of the situation, Laoise constricted her chest to keep from bursting into laughter, lest demonic social cues be vastly different to that of humans’. He pressed a kiss to the corner of her mouth. With a snap of his fingers, his trousers and shirt joined the pile at the foot of the bed – and, in a move that took her a little longer to register, so did the bottom half of her clothing.

Naked body to naked body. He kissed her breasts again, her hand reaching between their torsos to stroke the underside of his dick in response. The first thing she’d registered, based on how long it had taken her to stroke her fingers from the base to the tip, was how _alarmingly big_ it was.

Her face must’ve betrayed her response, or Hastur could pick up on her most embarrassing thoughts, for Hastur gave a grunt of realisation and said, ‘sorry, I’m estimating the size. I’ve been told by that little _wretch_ Crowley that the humans like them big.’

‘Phew,’ she exhaled, gripping his shaft with the pressure that always seemed to be right and giving it a few tugs. ‘Maybe not that big… wow. Wh- how big did you make it, exactly?’

‘Around half a foot.’

‘Fuck…’

‘I can shorten it. How big?’

‘Uh…’

Laoise had always been a little curious about something… _that_ long, but she didn’t want her time with Hastur to be a waste for the stupidly simple reason that it couldn’t fit.

‘Like this?’ She approximated a size with her hands.

‘This?’

‘A bit shorter?’

‘Very well.’

Where her hand had previously landed on the middle of the shaft, it now half-groped the tip. That’s more or less familiar.

‘It’s not a fixed size for your… vessel?’

‘ _Vessel_?’

‘Yeah, don’t you all possess human forms to get around? Is that not it?’

‘Oh, well, yes. We call them corporations. Decent knowledge. I can alter certain parts of my corporation when I like. For instance, Prince Beelzebub can get rid of their warts if they wish.’

‘Beelzebub’s real?’

‘Of course.’

She shook her head. This wasn’t what she was here for, a discussion about Hell’s exact personnel. Not yet, anyway. Detaching herself from the situation, she began to fantasize about a normal after-sex experience – cramped shower, lathering each other’s body and hair to cleanse each other of the fluids; idle chat, wrapped around each other and the sheets until you fall asleep against on the other’s shoulder and wake up alone or to the sound of the door latching. Reasonably, Hastur probably wasn’t one for aftercare.

‘Shall I?’ He began, giving his dick a few tugs before setting his leg above her hip to line himself up with her. Without a word, she traced her finger down his slender torso, ridges of ribs poking ever so slightly through skin as greyed as his face. It was a nice body, with a nice face, with an intriguing personality.

‘Please.’

Planting the heel of his palm next to her head for stability with the other wrapped around his cock, she flexed her hips upwards to allow him a wider target. She felt sodden, the sheets just beneath her vagina damp and evidencing her desperation. After a few wrong turns, he slid inside of her, inch by inch. She winced at the sensation, though most of the pain was negated as soon as he flushes fully against her, making shy shifts in and out of her body.

‘Harder.’

‘Don’t mind if I do.’

‘And faster, too. But not like you don’t mean it.’

‘What if I don’t mean it?’

She studied his face, her eyes able to make out more than a vague grey-black shape in the darkness of the room. Her legs tried to clamp together as he thrusts deep enough, forcing his mouth open in a silent moan.

‘I don’t believe that for a second.’

*

The pair laid shoulder to shoulder amongst the bunched-up sheets, no longer clean and smelling of sunlight and crisp breeze, but instead of sweat and come. Hastur stroked his hands up and down her left arm, wrapping his fingers around her wrists that boasted a rapid, excited heartbeat, pulling the extremity to his lips to press gentle kisses to.

‘That was quite the first time.’

‘Me too.’

Hastur turned his head on the cool pillow to give her an incredulous stare. ‘That can’t have been your first time. You lot are forever engaging in things like this. I would know, I make sure of it.’

She laughed at his assurance. ‘I meant first time with a demon. Jeez,’ she announces, catching sight of the digital red letters that her clock casts onto the ceiling. Two in the morning. It felt positively unreal. ‘We were at it for a while.’

‘I had a lot of things to try.’

‘I enjoyed the lot of them,’ she confirmed, shifting her head to rest further into the crook of his neck.

‘You’ve got quite beautiful hands.’

Her eyes welled with tears.

It was now May 1st, and she’d have to let Hastur go in the next few hours, maybe minutes, she knew it.

‘Thank you. You’ve got quite beautiful… everything.’

‘I’m still a demon.’

‘So? We seem sexualise you lot all the time,’ she said, turning her neck to meet his wide, dark eyes. ‘And with good reason, it seems.’

She tugged her arm free from his hands to rest upon her shoulder, kissing him on the forehead illicitly. She rested her nose there, holding the tender moment to herself. Was this still a dream? A part of her continued to imagine the worst-case scenario.

‘What was that?’ His voice was small.

The tears almost spilt over to her cheeks.

‘A gesture. A nice one.’ Expertly, she’d avoided casual use of the loaded word of ‘love’.

‘Right,’ he agrees, cupping her cheek and bringing her forehead to his lips, imitating her ‘nice gesture’.

She settled down to Hastur’s level again, wrapping her arms around her waist so at least she knew that something real was holding her, and would continue to hold her, should she finally wake up. Again imitating her, he rolled over onto his side to face her with greater ease. He leant his forehead against hers. The bedroom was still overbearingly warm, possibly even warmer than before. Her eyes grew leaden once more.

‘Will you still be here tomorrow morning?’ She asked in a voice laced with exhaustion, not wholly convinced she had been awake for the past few hours at all.

‘Maybe so,’ he answered, pushing her hair from her face and shifting closer to her. ‘I quite enjoyed this. No rest for the wicked, so no guarantees.’

‘Okay,’ she conceded, tears finally slipping down her cheeks.

‘Just because I’m not here doesn’t mean I won’t consider coming back, though.’

With that, Laoise allowed her eyes to close firmly, comfortable with losing her grip on consciousness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all the personal bits about Laoise's life totally aren't things that have happened to me recently I mean whaaaatttt...
> 
> credit where credit is due: this is somewhat inspired by the fic In League With Satan which was just ethereal go check it out for top grade Hastur content.  
> (Laoise is pronounced lee-sha :))


	2. Slow Down, Sir

She couldn’t bring herself to open her eyes just yet. The usual black hue of the backs of her eyelids dissolved into a bright orange as the sun hit her pale curtains just right, illuminating the yellow fabric with xanthous slats.

The bed felt empty. Out of her own morbid curiosity, she peeled her eyes open, immediately accosted by the light as it hit her pupils unfiltered. Hastur was gone. Had he even been real? Had it been a drunken fantasy, a product of life growing too heavy and leaden upon her fingers which gripped the edge of the cliff of reality for her to hang on any longer? How could she ever know?

A strange, sour scent hit her nostrils as soon as she attempted to curl her body up tighter, her nose pressed into the bedraggled sheets. That, _that_ was how she knew. The repugnant yet familiar and comforting odour of sweat and come and sex.

Somebody had definitely been there. Her cynical side was willing to blindly follow her optimistic side and concede that yes, _Hastur_ had been here.

But Hastur had left, and she was just as alone and empty and useless as she had been before the night before had ensued. Coffee? She asked herself, changing the subject in her mind before the thoughts could run too hard and too fast and produce a debilitating headache. Absolutely, she concurred.

Mulling over the half-drunk cup which had brewed too weakly, she reconciled with herself that she might – just _maybe_ – have to start getting her life back on track. The pub never paid well, so there was little put away, and the gears of the capitalist hell-machine had to start churning quick if she was going to keep herself planted firmly in Lambeth.

Bored of her own house, she turned her bedroom upside-down in search of respectable, job-hunting clothing. She settled on the ones she’d worn when she’d accidentally met Benny on his fag break and gotten offered a job at the Inferno, a memory which now felt a little ridiculous, as a nice blazer and a blouse really didn’t lend itself to aspirations of working in a pub; but she’d been feeling lazy and her were feet cramping in the heels and she was just _desperate_ for any kind of work. Which was where she was at again. No stopping to chat to people outside anywhere that you wouldn’t go for fun, she’d told herself. 

Laoise wound up in Soho after a circumlocutory walk that would have otherwise taken half an hour. She periodically stopped in at establishments that looked intriguing, dropping off her CV perhaps a little _too_ confidently and leaving without much chat. By the time she reached _A.Z. Fell’s_ bookstore, it felt as if she’d shown her face in every gallery, museum, or curator’s office in the west end. A bell chimed her entrance to the hazy, circular room.

It felt dreamy – the store smelt musty, of dust and centuries-old wood. Dust lingered lazily in the streams of light cutting through the lofty windows above the bookshelves that illuminated the particles, looking as if they’d become a whole new person if they floated near each other with enough gravity and resolve. The store was seemingly empty, unmanned, yet the unruly and crowded shelves that occupied as much floor space as was acceptable made Laoise feel well accompanied.

As she took in the store, unbothered by the dust that coated her fingers as she stroked the spines of books that just _had_ to be first editions, two overlapping voices carried in from the room that extended past the checkout. Hand still lingering on the spine of _Pseudomonarchia Daemonum_ – a title which curated a heavy feeling in the pit of her stomach, calling attention to the familiar ‘day-after’ pain that she’d expertly ignored since she’d woken up, and invigorated a slew of presumptuous and depressing thoughts in her mind – she cast her inquisitive look towards the back of the store, treading lightly on the beige carpet that secluded the splintered and creaky wooden panels.

‘I am _tell_ ing you, it’s been 6000 years in the making, they’re not giving up on this – ‘

‘Oh, Crowley, you cynic.’

‘Not without good reason. You know what our sides are like. We were just starting to have fun, right? Leave it to them to pull the rug out, just as it got good.’

‘Well, I’ve been enjoying our - _my_ \- time the _whole_ time…’

The conversation perplexed her. 6000 years? It must be a dramatic reading, she thought. Regardless, she rang the bell at the till with an uncertain hand and winced at the subsequent banging of furniture and train of colourful language produced by the man with the more colloquial accent, which she guessed was ‘Crowley’.

Two men appeared dutifully at the till, the shorter and portlier one pulling down on a rather archaic-looking waist coat. He looked flustered, put out, while the ganglier, more lively looking one of the two flashed her a smile that said _everything’s just fine_ , as if being caught in a compromising position; Laoise had the sneaking suspicion that she’d done just that.

‘Welcome to A.Z. Fell’s,’ the man with the smile – Crowley, based on accent – started impishly, to the other’s irritation.

‘Crowley – Anthony – be quiet. I’m Mr. Fell, how can I – ‘ ‘Mr. Fell’ bared his teeth in a gritted smile, looking as if it were taking all his energy to be pleasant. ‘Help you.’

The hostility caught her off guard. For such a clement shop, and a man that dressed liked a 1700s caricature, it felt hugely misplaced.

‘Just stopped in to browse.’ She offered a hand, spotting an opportunity. ‘I’m Laoise. I’m looking for a job. I stopped in here to take a break.’

Mr. Fell mollified and held her hand with little conviction, with Crowley on the other hand putting a little more into it. Nice to meet you, the pair said in unison, and the idea of a 6000-year-long relationship between them didn’t seem all too implausible, after all.

Well, also, she began in her head, not registering the rather unanimated tour of the shop Mr. Fell was giving her, I summoned a demon not twelve hours ago. I hazard to guess there’s a lot more where that came from.

Of course, despite her burning desire, she didn’t – she _couldn’t_ – flat out ask for clarification on the 6000 years thing, as the pair seemed cagey enough, nor could she enquire as to whether they too were demons, or knew of the underworld, or knew a certain Hastur. She wasn’t up for getting laughed out of a building this early on.

‘What sort of job, then?’ Crowley wanted to know, appearing beside her while Fell pottered around behind one of the multifarious bookshelves. 

‘Something in art. I figured I’d get a foot in the door with a curator, or a gallery.’

‘Any such luck?’

She looked up at him, eyes closing the at least six-inch disparity between their heights. His slenderness made him seem taller, as did the dark clothes and dishevelled hair. ‘Slow down, I’ve only just dropped off the resumes,’ she smiled.

Crowley smiled back, sticking his hands into his back pockets and reclining his shoulders. Fell poked his head around from the bookshelf, a stack of brown-covered books piled precariously in his hands.

‘He often goes fast,’ Fell commented, the pair sharing a covert look and a nod of the head as Fell placed a variety of books on the table. They were all engraved with names variegated artists, all far older than Fell’s manner and choice of clothing. ‘You’re interested in art, yes?’

‘Steady on, Angel,’ Crowley muttered into Fell’s ear, just loud enough for Laoise to still catch it. Angel? She barely contained her envy.

But also – Angel? Her suspicions grew.

‘Well, yes. _Pseudomonarchia Daemonum_ also caught my eye, admittedly. Can’t find that book anywhere.’

The pair shared a somewhat alarmed glance.

‘I’m afraid that isn’t for sale.’

‘Oh, alright. Why’s it on display?’

Crowley made uncertain noises, and Fell looked away sheepishly. ‘This is more of a… collection, rather than a store. Strictly speaking,’ Crowley explained.

‘Oh.’

‘Yes, well… sorry, dear.’

There was little left to say. She ran a finger over the book that read _Bosch_. She didn’t care if they were for sale or not, really.

‘Anything else?’ Fell eventually broke the silence, noticeably more impatient than before.

‘No, I’m fine. You have a lovely store, though. Good luck with it.’

She turned to leave, casting one last glance around the shelves although she couldn’t read any of the titles, just taking in the golden ridges amongst the red, blue, and green leathers and the fine writing etched into the fabric. The store, though easily romanticised, had left her feeling uneasy. What was at play there? And what had been so damning a conversation that two apparently polite men took their defensiveness to 1000?

*

Laoise grabbed a convenient lunch and ate it while staring absently at the trees in St. James’ Park. In an attempt to shake the feeling of discomfort she’d carried with her after leaving A.Z. Fell’s, she reasoned with herself that her odious feelings weren’t strictly reserved for Crowley and Fell, but at everything that had gone awry recently. That was it, it was just being _unsettled_. Everything was in its wrong place; all of the furniture had been moved an inch to the left and she kept knocking into things.

The sun was cold that day and as it moved across the unremarkable sky she found herself forgetting about last night more and more. It was a distressing feeling - she began to doubt her mind’s reliability as the memory of her words and actions, of Hastur’s face and movements, and her uncertainty as to how he’d gotten into her house, grew hazier and less coherent. The only thing she had to prove reality to herself was the aching in her abdomen, her insistence on washing her bedding, and the intense conviction that a part of her held that it was the most real thing she’d felt in a while.

But I was so tired, and drunk, she counters. I never remember what I do when I’m even a little inebriated, it all feels distant. I must’ve just dragged someone in on the way home. Maybe it was just a bit of escapism. What did he even say to me? Did I even use the Ouija board?

No – I did. It was where I’d left it the night before when I woke up. The key to the attic was out, too. Where the hell did Hastur come from? What kind of name is Hastur? (A demon’s name – oh, stop!)

Aggressively she bunched up the paper bag and worked her way out of St. James’, feeling the frustration etched onto her face as her features scrunched up painfully. She had to know, there had to be a way of figuring it all out; but the further she walked, the more people she wove through, the more dilute her determination and conviction became. Foregoing the rest of her stops further into Mayfair and the rest of Soho, she decided that she’d had enough interaction and mind games for the day, and opted for a dull afternoon cooped up in her flat, wishing she was anyone and anywhere else.

The witching hour rolled around, yet it was only a Thursday and it hadn’t felt quite right to drink casually while she was trying to get her life back together. Drinking the day before was excusable as she felt like ripping off her arms, or somebody’s arms, and beating herself over the head with them. To an extent, that was exactly what she was still feeling, except with just a _hint_ of ‘I need to keep my shit together for at least one night.’

Vodka was poured and terrible TV was consumed. With a kind of pathetic hope, she watched the screen far too closely to see if the pixels disjointed again, or whether the channels changed on their own. Nothing happened, not that she was surprised - only disappointed.

Seven p.m. came slowly, like a migraine, and lasted just as long. The sky was still too bright to go to sleep (and how boring would that be of me, to start going to bed at seven?). The spirits kept flowing; the doleful thoughts dug their heels into the wrinkles of her brain; the fruitless expectation for something more to life grew increasingly fervent as she felt the energy in the music she knew she’d almost certainly get noise complaints for in the morning. Musicians lived quite exciting lives. As did the broadcasters on the TV. Crowley and Fell seemed to have it together, if only because they had the façade of being a little older, a little wiser. Hastur, whoever he was, wherever her really came from, probably had an exciting life. Maybe it was their independence. Having a free agency, she contemplated, feeling her blood pumping a little too fast to her head and causing the seeds of a tender hangover to germinate.

There was a knocking from the hallway. She never got many visitors these days, especially not uninvited and at this hour – she ignored it, guiltily capping off the dregs of the Grey Goose. Moments later, the knocking grew more insistent, though not demanding.

Shooting up from the couch she caught sight of herself in the grand mirror above the mantel piece. What a goddamn _mess_. She untied her hair, pulled down her shorts, and hoped she looked like she was just having an off moment in the sea of lovely, aesthetically pleasing moments in her oh-so wonderful life.

Before the visitor could knock again, she yanked the chain down and opened the door with a little less abandon. It was Crowley.

‘Hi.’

‘Hi.’

‘Sorry, must be disturbing you right now. But I came to bring you this,’ he said apologetically, holding out a brown paper bag. Inside was the _Bosch_ book, tied with frayed string.

‘Oh, wow, thank you. Do I owe you, or Mr. Fell?’

‘Call him Aziraphale. Stupid pseudonyms… but no, not a penny. Thought I’d apologise for how we acted. Angel – Aziraphale – isn’t too fond of letting the books out the shop. I’m surprised he offered anything at all.’

She nodded, rolling her bottom lip between her teeth as she flipped through the delicate, Bible-thin pages. They felt on the verge of collapsing to dust. Laoise supposed that what Crowley had said was meant to make her feel special, but it changed nothing.

‘It’s alright. Thanks for the – ‘

She almost dropped the book, staggering back from the door.

‘How the fuck did you find my apartment?’

Crowley held his hands behind his back, his face that had earlier been unreadable for his sunglasses now read, with excruciating obviousness, _‘this is the biggest cockup of my life_.’

‘Take the book back. What the fuck…’ she wiped her sweating palms on her bare legs, then threading them in her hair. She stared balefully at him as Crowley still stood in the doorway, packing up the book without taking his eyes off of her. ‘Seriously, Crowley. Go.’

‘I could explain.’

‘I don’t think I want you to.’

The TV played quietly in the background, the most prominent sound being the pulse in her ears and her unsteady breathing. Snaking her arms around her waist protectively, again reminding herself of the night before, she nodded at him in acquiescence.

‘How much of mine and Angel’s conversation did you hear?’

‘Why do you call him Angel?’

Crowley sighed, rubbing his hands over his face and flinching as he almost knocked the dark glasses.

‘And what’s with the sunglasses indoors?’

‘Christ – ‘

At this, Crowley held his chest an appeared to force down bile – ‘above. Eugh, can’t believe I just said that. You sound like Hastur.’

Silence.

Silence.

Silence. 

‘Hastur?’ She ventured, voice kept to as low of a volume as possible, lest she speak too loudly and send the moment crashing to the ground like the magnitudes of an earthquake tearing up whole cities. The whole situation was utterly surreal.

‘You know him? He try and rip out your tongue or something?’

Well, in a way, she thought with a conspiratorial smile. Crowley only cocked an eyebrow and shook his head, stepping closer to the threshold.

‘Can I come in? I feel like this is a sit-down job.’

About to say yes, she got her wave of rationality. ‘No – I mean, yes, but this is still so, _so_ , out of line.’

‘Righto.’ Crowley slid through the space between Laoise and the doorframe, considering her hallway with the same intrigue with which she’d regarded the bookshop.

‘Living room’s through here.’ 

‘I like the mirror. Nice frame, very august.’

‘Thank you.’ 

With Crowley slouched on one chair and her leant against the arm of another, she stared at him expectantly, eyes settled on the sunglasses.

‘Take them off.’

Crowley gave a guttural noise of distaste. ‘In good time. In good time. Can I explain?’

‘You needn’t ask.’

‘You can’t freak out.’

‘I’ve been through enough in, oh,’ she snuck a furtive glance at the clock, now coming up to eight. ‘Twenty-four hours. Try me.’

Crowley rubbed the back of his neck, seemingly in thought. ‘Twenty-four hours…’ he said under his breath before reaching an epiphany with alarming amounts of gusto.

‘ _THAT’S_ where Hastur went!’

Her stomach sank. Was this a huge joke? Had these people broken into her house last night? She felt her tears coming back up for air. Thankfully, in and amongst his eureka moment, Crowley noticed the sheen forming over the tissue.

‘Oh, no, don’t do… don’t do that. Did I say something?’

She laughed, incredulous. ‘You and your boyfriend were rude to me, you then show up at my house with, still, no explanation, and then you seem to know exactly what I got up to last night. So, yeah. It might’ve been something you said.’

Though still beholding an apologetic frown, he needled the Hastur issue. ‘So, I was right about Hastur.’

‘Oh, my God, you’re so aloof. Yes, you were right. Ugh, why am I telling you this? You don’t seem particularly reliable.’

‘That’s exactly what Hastur would say. Bastard. Can’t see why he doesn’t trust me, really.’

‘Is that so?’

Crowley’s laughter falls flat, as if he’s realised something. ‘Reckon Hastur’s coming back to you?’

‘Don’t be an ass.’

‘What? I’m not! Sore subject?’

‘Why do you care?’

‘Because I reckon, if this is one of his serious endeavours – finally – then he’ll discorporate me for coming within 100 feet of it.’

_One_ of his serious endeavours? She repeats the question to Crowley.

‘No, not like that. This is his first time, if you can believe it. Occasionally us demons stray – oops, let the cat out of the bag there, you already knew, though, didn’t you?’

She nodded, finally feeling somewhat ascertained about last night. Demons were real. So were angels, probably. So… God? She bit her tongue, not ready to solve Pascal’s Wager.

‘Great. I’m a demon, Hastur’s a demon, Angel’s an angel… good recap?’

‘Perfect,’ she managed, body shaking and cold chills shooting up her arms and paralysing her shoulders. ‘Shit. Are you sure you’re not fucking with me?’

‘Was Hastur not proof enough? Here, look,’ he slid his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose, sticking a forked tongue out at her and exposing yellow eyes the shade of hazard symbols. ‘How ‘bout that?’

‘Yep. Great. Very impressive.’

‘Are you alright?’

Hugging herself tighter, she repressed the urge to scream, or to laugh in his face. ‘This is a lot to take in. I’m a lot drunker than I was last night, and I don’t think I even particularly believed Hastur.’

‘What? Didn’t he just manifest somewhere? Oh, bless him, did he knock?’

She shook her head.

Crowley tapped out a lazy rhythm on the arm of his chair, whistling along whilst apparently oblivious to her minor breakdown. Though, why? This knowledge changed little of her worldview, she’d always been open to this sort of thing. It just so happened that the part of her that believed in it was right; besides, was it so much worse to actually live your truth than to be speculating, agonising, like centuries and centuries of theologians and philosophers before her? She knew more for certain than Augustine, Aquinas, Milton, Nietzsche. It almost felt empowering.

Unravelling herself and wiping at her cheeks to gain a semblance of composure, she levelled her gaze at Crowley (as best she could through the tinted glasses). ‘So, it’s all real.’

‘Unfortunately.’

‘Huh. So, through your, what, demonic intuition you found me?’

‘That’s a word for it, yes. As Aziraphale is _so_ fond of telling me, ‘it’s best not to speculate’. We’re _ineffable_.’

The way he mocked the pretentious word with a nasally voice made her laugh, full of humour, no hint of bitterness or scepticism. It felt nice; for the poverty of language, there was no other word better suited for the sensation.

‘Will Hastur come back?’ She asked despite herself, begrudgingly allowing her doubtful thoughts to devour the moment of simplicity and peace. Crowley only shrugged.

‘He might. Did seem rather proud of himself when we ran into each other, you know, _downstairs._ ’

Laoise pulled at her lip to conceal the embarrassing smile that was brute-forcing its way onto her mouth. Not wanting to make matters more uncomfortable, as she got the sense that there was bad-blood between the two demons, she resisted the urge to ask if Hastur had mentioned anything in particular.

Instead, she wanted to know: ‘am I doing something fucked up?’

Crowley barked a laugh, reclining further into the slope of the chair to the point that it couldn’t possibly be comfortable anymore. ‘Only because it’s Hastur. I kid, I kid. It’ll probably do him some good to get out more. Good luck with him. He needs to be broken in, mind. Never gone anywhere _near_ a human before now.’ 

Finally letting herself smile indulgently, Crowley patted his knees in a painfully human (and uniquely British) way, and got up to leave. His height was still alarming, yet Hastur had been taller. It was all in the dark, tight-fitting clothes, she noted.

‘I must be going. Now that you – hopefully – aren’t totally outraged at my coming here, do you want Hieronymus or not?’ Crowley offered again, waving the book back and forth between the two.

She considered, not feeling strongly one way or the other. To be polite, as he had come all this way, she took the bag before he could pull it away again.

‘Thanks for the book – thank Aziraphale, too, if he’s protective of them. I promise he’ll have it back.’

‘He won’t even notice it gone,’ Crowley assured, kissing her on the cheek before seeing himself out the door. ‘One more thing – Angel _is not_ my ‘boyfriend’, alright? Not even close. Bloody hereditary enemies…’ he muttered, still grumbling as he reached the end of the hallway. Moments later, as she sat shell-shocked while simultaneously rather pleased with herself on the sofa, the cough of an old car starting up floated up to her open windows, the screech of rubber on tarmac following closely after.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes I dragged the ineffable husbands into this in an emotional capacity. and what of it?


	3. Killed God, Blood Soiled, Skin Dead Again

There was no personal space in Hell. Regardless of his imposing height, and the intrinsic connotations of his title of Duke, the sea of the swarming Fallen and Disgraced never parted in their meandering trudge through the corridors of the underworld for Hastur. He flinched each time his shoulder knocked somebody else’s, always earning him an empty glare before the other demon went about their mindless journey through the halls.

He groused and fought through the hapless souls, seemingly lost, (though they were right at home, weren’t they? Hastur thought he couldn’t explain their apparent misery to himself, despite the same misery sitting full-weight on his chest every passing day) and eventually reached the small table comprised of rotted oak that he called his workspace. The small slip of wood that he could usually see amongst the unstable stacks of paperwork and files was entirely consumed, papers stuck unceremoniously between vertical stacks to ensure that they found a home on the desk. A rumour of an overwhelming feeling pressed up from his stomach, the only way to combat it (without attracting too much negative attention from the demons he shared the ‘office’ with) being to clench and unclench his fingers so tight that the joints cramped and his bitten fingernails broke the skin of his palms. 

Adding to the desolation was a small, square note attached to the top of one of the piles with a thumbtack. It gave a time, a room number, and was signed _Beelzebub_. The pressure increased, tenfold. Stabilising himself on the stack, sneaking the note from the top leaf and sequestering it into one of the trench coat’s many pockets, he tried to find the clock – the only clock in Hell, which displayed Central European Time and was hung up sideways. Yet, in true Hastur luck, the wretched thing was blocked by a demon taller than him, and (as it usually happened) far burlier than him. Hastur hadn’t felt like letting his stare linger too long, nor did he need the subsequent consequence of inadvertently picking a fight with someone who’d chosen a corporation like _that_. Hastur had barely held his own against one of the smaller Great Dukes back in 1492, who since then had been inconveniently discorporated and never reappeared, much to Hastur’s eternal relief.

He’d hoped that it was the right time. Besides, Beelzebub never minded Hastur showing up, unless they were recuperating from a summoning or an otherwise exhausting excursion. Then there would be trouble.

Though he’d seen them for the last hundred or so years, he read each of the demotivational posters as he worked his way back through the cramped halls to Beelzebub’s office – the only demon in Hell that didn’t have to co-occupy a cubicle.

_WE HATE YOU_

_You DON’T MATTER_

_YOU DON’T HAVE A MOTHER_

_RIP OUT YOUR OWN THROAT WITH A STAPLER_

According to one of the signs, it had been two days without the phrase ‘the path to Hell is paved with good intentions’ had been uttered in the basement office. Hastur smiled to himself, knowing he’d never been one to break that rule. 

Finally, he reached Beelzebub’s door, refraining from knocking as he heard idle chatter coming from inside.

_‘And what would you do to me then… oh, you disgusting angel…’_

Angel? Was Beelzebub taunting a demon, or truly fraternizing to the highest order? Hastur stopped dead by the door, flattening himself against the wall as he’d seen in that one human movie about thirty years ago. It was wrong to eavesdrop, but he _was_ down here for wrongdoings, after all.

_‘Gabriel, you piece of shit. I can’t believe your standards have dropped as low as me… are you coming? Stop it. Now. You don’t deserve it.’_

Hastur was horrified. Gabriel, of all angels? That unctuous archangel had been the one to smite him during the first Great War, slashing his collarbones open with consecrated swords and ripping apart his wings as he fell from the pure, white clouds lined with gold and grace. 

Hastur refused to think about the War. Yes, he was one of The Fallen (never forget it), but the memory of being tortured and sent cascading down at 100 light years per hour into a burning inferno that had left his clothes muddied from crashing through the terrain of the Earth and scorched from the then unbearably hot flames of Hell, was often too prodigious a concept to bear contemplating day to day; even more so in the dour and hostile quartiers of Hell.

Stop it, Hastur, he disciplined himself, straightening out his trench coat and catching one final screeching laugh from Beelzebub’s office, as well as some particularly lascivious sentiments. You chose this life for yourself.

Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven - Beelzebub had read that out in a weekly briefing once, in about 1667. Except Hastur wasn’t reigning in Hell – it felt all too similar to Heavenly servitude, but with the added green sludge dripping from the omni-burst pipes, and endless hostility and irreverence from his inferiors. Hastur hated questioning Hell’s authority. He figured he should stop, before he got himself in as deep a hole as he’d landed in six millennia ago.

Evidently not welcome in his Prince’s office at the time, he decided to get down to business on some of that horrendously voluptuous paperwork. He figured he could save his sanity by eating away at it, bit by bit. The paperwork had been fun, to begin with. For about the first thousand years or so, when it was rare to tempt somebody pious or to burn down a monastery and steal their indulgences for nothing. Then the Vikings did the lot of that for them, and it had all been downhill from there.

His mind kept wandering back to the lusty, heated interaction between Beelzebub and Gabriel. Based on his out-of-character soiree the other week, Hastur decided that it was far from him to cast much judgement upon those more superior, and holier, than he. Speaking of his venture last week…

He’d remembered the girl being upset when they’d finished, which had been alarming to Hastur. He’d been far from upset, he’d transcended to a higher form of clarity after coming inside of her than he’d ever experienced in his numerous centuries of living – he thought he’d have experienced it all by then, and how wrong he was. That euphoria, the lack of demonic responsibility dissolving like sugar in tea as he lay there staring at her white ceiling, was unmatched, and highly desirable. Hastur, detester of humanity, Duke of Hell, King in Yellow, was infatuated by a _human being_. What were the Hellish forces coming to? Despite his initial distaste, Hastur placated his spiteful thoughts, reminding himself that he had, in fact, enjoyed the night spent with Laoise, and had promised to return. At the memory of how good she’d been, how much trust he’d felt emanating from her very being, and equally how much despair and desolation he’d detected, akin to his own auras, he smiled in his own way, hoping no other demon would catch the twitching at his mouth.

Of course, one had.

‘Lovely girl, Hastur. Sticking a toe into the wild side, are we?’

Crowley. Of course.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Hastur said, fiddling with hard-to-reach papers in the middle of the endlessly heavy piles.

‘She seems a nice girl. So, don’t. Fuck. It. Up.’

With that, Crowley was back out of the office in an instant, presumably ascending back to Earth. Hastur was lost for words, staring at the space that Crowley had briefly occupied. ‘Don’t fuck it up?’ Who did Crowley think he was talking to? Hastur had been tempting humans for centuries, and in order to do that he had to have _some_ grasp on their mannerisms, right?

Deep down, Hastur was aware of his obliviousness, his awkward manner, how diametrically opposed he’d been to the human race since the Fall – it’s why he’d Fallen in the first place, in league with Lucifer himself when he’d refused to bow to God’s newest toy: Humanity.

Now Hastur never saw Lucifer – Satan, rather. The appeal of the Fall had dispersed the more that Satan separated themselves from the grander operation, instead facelessly delegating nefarious deeds to Beelzebub and the Dukes. It no longer felt glamorous, and yet Crowley still _embodied_ pure glamour. Not that Hastur cared…

… but maybe he wouldn’t be so averse to some excitement and allure to life.

Unable to work for his fanciful thoughts, almost certainly invigorated by his traitorous behaviours in relation to Laoise, he used a little curse of his own to strand the lecherous thoughts in a disjointed corner of his mind, just to seize some focus.

Despite one of the Seven Deadly Sins being Lust, Hastur had never felt arousal like this, even in 6000 years. It was painful, uncomfortable, but oh-so lovely and pleasurable in the ache and desire it stirred in his cock and the pit of his stomach. 

Maybe the paperwork wasn’t terribly necessary, after all.

*

Hell was always hot and humid – that day, like almost every other day, save for the odd weeks in May and June, London was overcast and about 400 degrees cooler than Hastur was used to (Hell was precisely 444.6 degrees Celsius). He didn’t mind, though. He was never one for the sun – what a terrible time he’d had doing temptations in the summer of 1976 – and the breeze was what Hastur guessed humans would call ‘refreshing’, rather than ‘bothersome’, if they’d dwelled in an inferno for as long as he had.

He’d taken a back door out of Hell, as they logged the sign-ins and sign-outs in a waterlogged book by the stairwell (actually leading to an escalator which they’d implemented by Abaddon to promote Sloth about twenty years ago, a contraption that Hastur distrusted greatly and had petitioned for its dismantling). The rift opened up in a thin alleyway, narrowed even further with stocky green bins into which a man in an apron reading _The Inferno_ was heaving large bags of rubbish. The man, oblivious still to Hastur, retreated into a side door above which hung a sign also reading: _The Inferno._

Hastur was at first taken aback by how on-the-nose his point of entry had been, wondering if this was a joke orchestrated by ~~Crowley~~ another demon. 

It was enough luck not to have been seen slowly emerging from a swirling cloud of smoke and feathers that was so black it sucked the light in – Hastur figured it best not to think too negatively about his surroundings, as he’d been blessed (figuratively speaking) with oblivious bystanders. He stalked through to the street, where he was met with churning rows and hordes of people, akin to that of Hell. Though at the time still unwilling to admit it, maybe this realm wouldn’t be so tricky to acclimatise to.

Hastur had to get to the problem at hand – where could the human be? Humans usually worked at this hour, despite the milling crowds of people out on the street alluding otherwise, so it would likely be no use to him to manifest in her house again. Besides, he didn’t know the details of the location well enough _(yet)_ to send himself there on a whim.

So, fantastic, he thinks to himself, realising that on Earth you catch a lot more flack and verbal abuse for stopping dead in the middle of the hustle. I have a gigantic city on my hands and not the faintest idea where to look – and all these bloody _people_ to thwart.

Strictly speaking, Hastur was not an inconspicuous sight. He was tall, gangly, produced an odd smell, had tattered clothing, and a string of warts and pitch-black eyes. In a smaller town, a more conservative area, Hastur might’ve been chased out of the village with pitchforks and fire; however, luckily for him, the excitement he was pursuing dwelled in the heart of the country, where plenty of other odd ducks gravitated, so even the cleanest-cut of grey-faced bureaucrats were bustling by him far too fast to bat an eyelid – they’ll probably just see something weirder and more wonderful tomorrow, anyway. Another thing that made Hastur feel slightly more secure in going unnoticed amongst the blander of God’s creations was the time in 1988 where he’d been mistaken for a performance artist doing promotional work for something called a ‘Beetlejuice’. So, maybe that would work again, assuming the ‘Beetlejuice’ was as eternal as he was.

*

She and Crowley boredly, and somewhat enviously on her part, watched Aziraphale sample each of the pastries and cakes he’d bought for an inordinate amount of money to the delight and disturbance of the waitress. Now verging on a week with no sign of Hastur, very few call-backs for jobs, and dwindling contact with her friends, Laoise couldn’t stand much more isolation. So, she made her way back to _A.Z. Fell’s_ , and caught the pair just as they were about to go for a mid-morning coffee – and, for Aziraphale, a mid-morning desert platter.

‘Scrumptious,’ the angel breathed euphorically, dabbing at his pursed lips with a paper napkin that he had regarded as ‘far lower class’ than he was used to.

‘Glad one of us is having a good time,’ Crowley commented, nodding sympathetically at Laoise. She gave a wilted smile back, still looking at the stained table with baleful eyes.

‘Oh, sorry, dear. I’ll try to have a little less fun,’ Aziraphale said, waving his fingers to accentuate the word ‘fun’. ‘Would you care for any of my Schwarzwald? It’s proving a tad heavy for my taste.’

Laoise hummed in amusement, she hadn’t thought that anything could be too luscious for Aziraphale.

‘I’m alright, but thank you. I haven’t much of an appetite these days.’

The pair shared a concerned look, a kind of telepathy that they regularly engaged in, Laoise had come to realise in the short time that she’d known them.

‘You can’t seriously be losing function over someone like _Hastur_?’ Crowley said with distaste, nearly forgetting himself and slipping into hissing intones.

‘It’s not just Hastur. It’s work, it’s my friends. I haven’t a job, and my rent is obscene, and my friends know I’ve been going through a rough patch for a while and they all tend to steer clear of me when that happens.’

Another worrisome glance.

‘Laoise, if you need any help…’

Aziraphale cut Crowley off. ‘We’ve not known you long, I know, but thanks to _some_ body,’ a not-too-serious glare was fired at Crowley, ‘you know a fair bit about the two of us that I believe qualifies you as more than just somebody we know.’

Aziraphale placed a hand on her knee, and she realised that she hadn’t been touched -save for Hastur, last week – in months. The sensation of a foreign influence on her body while she was sober made her feel sick, made her grow hot and distressed. She knew the angel had to pull away eventually but she wished, just for a second of irrationality, that it could rest there until the feeling got boring and tired. Instead, she nodded while pinching her lip until it felt like the flesh would erupt, saying nothing at all.

‘Anything at all, we’re right here in Soho. Need a house? I can make room amongst the plants.’

‘And a job - if it seems as though it’d take a _real_ _miracle_ for that to happen, well…’ Aziraphale dropped his voice to a conspiratorial murmur, winking at her as Crowley made a noise of approval.

‘Thought Gabey said no more frivolous miracles, Angel?’

‘Crowley! This is hardly frivolous.’

‘I’s a joke, Angel.’

‘I’m quite aware,’ Aziraphale huffed as the trio stood, collecting their coats, and pulled his waistcoat down over his soft stomach indignantly.

As they neared the bookstore, Laoise grew more restless and agitated. It was the end of her outing, the saccharine escapism slipping through her fingers before she’d be cast out to occupy herself once more. By herself, all she did was _think_ and _dwell_ and drive herself to the dredges of her mind that were slippery slopes, difficult to scramble out of. Was she not worth Hastur’s time? The employers’ time? Not even her friends’ time, anymore? So much for chosen family - it was just like her assigned family.

She wasn’t quite comfortable enough to invite herself into the bookstore to drink with Crowley and Aziraphale. It felt too intimate, and she didn’t trust herself not to blow this new endeavour up, too, by drunkenly embarrassing herself. Instead, despite the allure of the store begging her to come and take a seat for copious amounts of alcohol, she stopped awkwardly by the door, waving goodbye as she paced backwards down the rest of the street until she hit the corner.

Her legs made quick work, arms folded defensively across herself. The wind was growing more aggravated, whipping her hair around and landing it inopportunely in front of her eyes and becoming an immovable force. She swore under her breath; her mood had already plummeted to its default rock-bottom.

It wasn’t long before she realised where she was – right on the doorstep of _The Inferno_. This is fucking ridiculous, she raged in her mind while keeping a completely neutral expression as she looked the building up and down. Down the alleyway, she could just about see the patch of grass that constituted the small graveyard, just yards away from the back of the pub. The wind seemed to drop in time for her to cast a judgemental glance through the smudged windows, the pettier side of her hoping to see the barstools unoccupied and business going slow as usual – she had been granted the satisfaction.

Laoise jumped as the familiar sound of clanking bottles and cans rang out sonorously from the alley. Curious, she leaned around the corner of the building ever-so slightly and caught the tip of Benny’s elbow as he retreated back into the building from emptying the bins. Afraid of being caught snooping and the patronising conversation that would ensue, she yanked herself back to the front of the pub, snapping her head forward and resuming the race to Lambeth Bridge. 

Oddly (and in hindsight, fortuitously) she remembered the simple teaching from her father of ‘head up, shoulders back’. It was a doctrine imposed to make her _appear_ more confident, and in turn _make_ her more confident, as opposed to wandering the streets folded up like a deck chair that had all the self-awareness needed to hate itself. Maybe that’s what I need, she considered; maybe this will turn my luck around.

Now, had Laoise not recently come into the hard-to-digest knowledge of the existence of God, celestial beings, and demonic entities, the event that followed that initially throw-away thought would have exasperated her in all of its improbability and timeliness. However, now that anything in the universe was fair game, including serendipity and miracles, the sight of a looming man with white-blond hair brushing the filthy lapels of a trench coat was not as perplexing as it could’ve been.

He was about five people ahead of her, and the configuration of the London pavement crowd was notoriously hard to upset.

This pursuit was so vital to her in that moment that she lost her people-pleasing nature, forgetting the irritable stares and grumbled abuse that she just about noticed in the flurry of desperation to catch up to Hastur.

One person away. Oh, fuck it.

‘Hastur!’

That had drawn more attention than she would’ve liked – most importantly, from Hastur. He had been lingering on the edge of the pavement, dangerously close to being jostled into the busy road by just one careless jostle. Just before the barren bike rack, Hastur stopped and turned to look around frantically before his eyes swept over her, and then away again, and finally settling back on her in realisation. He looked no less panicked, but he wasn’t bolting away, so Laoise took that as her cue to force her way next to him.

‘Human…’ he began, a hint of nerves shivering over the syllables.

‘Demon.’

The pair loitered in an awkward silence a few moments more, further inconveniencing the foot traffic. Neither minded their uncouthness terribly, though.

‘What’re you doing in London?’

Hastur raised his eyebrows at her, making them disappear behind the loose strands of hair that had come unfixed in front of his forehead.

‘Isn’t it obvious?’

( _‘Bloody people…’_ had been muttered upwards of a dozen times during the interaction, and Hastur’s dangerous glowers were growing increasingly threatening).

‘Not to me.’

‘I was coming to find you!’ He exclaimed, a little too loud to be acceptable on Earth.

Nevertheless, she felt her face flush uncomfortably hot and had as hard a time policing her smile as she did when Crowley had paid her a visit.

‘Oh, well. I’m flattered. I hate to say it, but I’ve really been dwelling on when I’d see you again.’

‘Well, here I am.’

The demon seemed far friendlier than the other night, although still aloof and abrupt. Laoise was at a loss again, and decided to spur the encounter on. Careful not to be too sudden or heavy-handed, she turned him in the right direction with a hand on his elbow and led him back on their original course.

‘Where are we going?’

‘I was going to go home, but if you’d like to do anything else I’m completely free.’

‘Uh… I think your house will be fine.’

It was an acceptable answer, though phrased a little stiffly. Brushing it off as regular social awkwardness, Laoise let her hand drop from the loose material of the trench coat and left Hastur to follow her back to Lambeth.

‘Would you like me to get a taxi?’

‘What’s a taxi?’

Laoise was stunned. Of all the things, she was _certain_ that taxis were Hellish creations. Hard to get on time, went on circumlocutory routes if they thought you weren’t from the area, never stopped talking…

‘It’s like a car, well it _is_ a car, but someone else drives you and sometimes you share it with strangers. You don’t have to, though. And you have to pay for it.’

Hastur gave a loud noise of disgust. ‘Eugh. No. Don’t like cars. Heavenly things. Go too fast, blatant death machines if you ask me – and it says a _lot_ that I don’t like a death machine.’

‘Right, noted,’ she laughed, the sound choking to a halt in her throat as their hands brushed when a rather audacious runner pushed right into her.

‘ _Crowley_ loves his car. I remember when he drove me about in it in the 60s, nearly killed me.’

‘Oh, I know Crowley.’

The silence wasn’t just defined by Hastur’s lack of speech, it was purposeful, palpable, and riddled with hostility.

‘How?’

She thought better than to mention Aziraphale. ‘Came to try and give me a book I’d left behind when I was job hunting. I got a bit arsey with him about showing up to my apartment, and about his sunglasses. He said I was just like you. I forgot myself a bit and might’ve made it a tad obvious that I knew you.’

‘Right… I should’ve known he’d encountered you by now. He said that you seemed a… ‘lovely girl.’’

‘Oh. That was nice of him.’

‘Mm. Be wary of him, he’s really not a very good demon. Cuts of telephone services instead of doing _real_ temptations, like me.’

By Hastur’s tone, it was more than obvious that he was trying to posture to Laoise, to curry her favour and respect above Crowley. Not wanting the demon to get the wrong end of the stick with her, or to dwell on this fact, she leant into the dance.

‘Oh? What kind of temptations does Your Disgrace do?’

‘Ah! All sorts. Cast doubt in the minds of priests and force lust unto them. Incurring wrath to invigorate disorder and rebellion. Real soul-harvesting temptations for my Master.’

‘Lucifer?’

‘Mm.’

Hastur’s tone fell, despite being full of life and volume just moments before. Was Lucifer a sore subject? Surely not; it was unlikely that Hastur’s fanaticism could be so fully fledged if he didn’t like his boss. God – Satan? - knows Laoise’s didn’t.

Laoise dropped it, not wanting to find out what Hastur would do to curious prods. Instead she made peace with the silence between them, using the time to observe parts of his body she hadn’t properly appreciated in the dimness of the night. Save for the pale green warts that were more akin to scales, he had pleasing hands. They were quite the pair she’d been expecting, judging on the sensation they’d created that night. Nice to finally meet the creator, she thought.

‘So, how far is your home?’

‘About twenty minutes from here.’

Hastur grunted affirmatively, falling into step with her to match the pace of her speed-walk.

‘What’s the rush?’ He queried, having to raise his voice further as they passed through St. James’ Park, the lunchtime rush seeming to have congregated there as it did most days. It was unfortunately close to Westminster, and even cosier with Buckingham Palace. One thing Laoise could use to console herself was that she hadn’t got the commute through tourist-hell central each day.

‘Just trying to beat the zombie hordes. People get so enthralled with the Palace, and Parliament, it’s ridiculous. I see them every day. Even the people who’ve lived here longer than me seem infatuated.’

Hastur made a noise akin to amusement.

‘I remember being here when it was constructed. ’04, I think. 1704, that is.’

‘Woah,’ she marvelled, not sure why she was surprised, given his age. ‘What was it like?’

‘Didn’t stay for long. Load of scaffolding, but it looked real flash,’ Hastur spat, manifesting a cigarette out of nowhere and lighting it with a grievously large flame. ‘Still looks real flash… I’m almost glad that those bastards don’t end up on my side, with the Divine Right and all. Don’t need any more vainglorious gobshites.’

Laoise was too puzzled by the interesting method of cigarette lighting to find humour in Hastur’s comment, which sounded terribly akin to many of her drunken polemics she’d given about the aristocracy in her time.

‘Hastur, where did that massive fire come from?’

‘Oh, the infernal flames?’ He said, voice a prideful growl. ‘I can conjure it up when I like. Quite impressive, don’t you think?’

His tone of voice made her shiver; it was flirtatious, whether Hastur knew that or not, and positively _vulgar_. From any normal human, the sultry rumble would absolutely be an invitation to something fun – but, alas, Hastur was not any normal human, and could very well just be his tone for articulating his evident appreciation of infernal flames. Regardless, she flushed, pulling at the collar of her blouse and caressing her glowing cheeks with icy hands.

Hastur didn’t wait for an affirmation on the merit of fire before embarking on a story about the time he’d successfully lured the president of the Vatican bank into embezzlement (when her head was clearer a little later, she realised that she remembered hearing of that case on the news around a decade ago. She wondered how many other cases of corruption and sudden turns of evil were at the hands of Hastur). She hadn’t been paying much attention though, finally hitting on the _exact_ reason that her legs were carrying her – and Hastur – so fast to the nearest available bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ineffable bureaucracy. that's it. I love them. possibly more than I love my indulgent self-insert with hastur. yes Gabriel likes being humiliated, not that he knows it in so many words. beelzebub likes obliging him.


	4. Flowers on the Side of the Road

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we're baaaack.  
> did I proofread this? no <3

‘How are the _Legions of the Damned_ faring, your Highness?’

‘It’s your _Low_ ness. And they’re doing tremendously, truly whipping up a Hellish rage for the big day.’

The vast meeting room fell into a smug silence. Beelzebub smirked. Gabriel smirked back.

‘We will win, of course,’ Beelzebub clarified, lifting her legs up to rest upon the spotless, pristine white surface in the Heavenly office. Mud, grease, and ash shook from her boots and burnt up as it touched the table.

‘I wouldn’t be too sure. You’re forgetting so willingly about the last Great War? You were all sitting ducks – ‘

Beelzebub flew forward, hands cracking down on the table, sending a shudder through the 7 chairs laid out between them. ‘Do not bring that up. That _zz_ unfair and you know it.’ A few heavy breaths later, ‘I was _zz_ of the highes _zz_ t order before I fell. Far more grac _zz_ eful than you’ll ever be.’

Gabriel was unmoved, even with the resurgence of Beelzebub’s buzzing lisp. He continued to stare calmly, hands folded neatly on his crisp creases of his trousers. The pride he felt in his appearance was elevated when around – well, anybody else, really - but especially the Prince of Hell.

‘Your temper is unbecoming.’

‘Ye _zz_ , and your righteousness feels contradictory to _love thy neighbour_ – eugh,’ Beelzebub felt faint and collapsed back in their chair at the utterance of Heavenly doctrine. The pair were at an impasse, both thoroughly not enjoying the premise of having to discuss the upcoming celestial war. That was business; that was boring. The bureaucrats of their respective departments saw each other regularly, but never for something so above-board and official. The frustration and tension threading through the energies emitted by both entities was what fuelled their certain kind of relationship, and was necessary for what one of them would inevitably suggest next.

‘How about we call this meeting a misstep and go back to our respective departments…’ Gabriel was the one to venture.

‘And then come back to it when we’ve both had some… room to breathe,’ Beelzebub finished, spreading their hands out to the side as if presenting a physical object.

‘Sounds delightful,’ Gabriel said, the tight smirk not having left his face for the whole meeting.

Beelzebub made her way to the door, grimacing at the brightness and immaculateness of the office. ‘Don’t get this sort in Hell…’

Well, you shouldn’t have questioned Her authority, Gabriel allowed himself to think, knowing better than to say it outright. There were multiple reasons that Gabriel wished that Beelzebub hadn’t been one of the Fallen, not that he would ever sacrifice much of his Heavenly time to consider this for too long.

Before the demon could reach for the door handle, Gabriel pressed his fingertips to the door and leaned down to their ear.

‘Seventh terrace of Purgatory, fifteen minutes?’

‘I’ll clear the decks. Fast-track a few souls.’

‘On it. I’ll take post 10th century, you take pre?’

‘Deal. Now let me out.’

Gabriel stumbled back from the door as Beelzebub thrust it open with all the force of the 10 million demons serving under them. For a brief moment, Gabriel’s assurance in the Celestial Army wavered, quickly castigating himself as he felt God’s disappointment press against his ethereal dimension.

He watched Beelzebub storm through Heaven, a dark animal rampaging through inviolable snow. A few angels on hoverboards crashed as they struggled to swerve out of the way in time, bringing a hint of genuine amusement to Gabriel’s typically austere gaze.

*

Back on Earth, a less unlikely pair (by a very small margin) sat and talked in the same living room that they’d sat and talked in just a week before, the conversation far less hostile and far more wound with curiosity. Hastur, in all of his new-found curiosity of Earth, was committing himself to better-grasping their customs and rituals, which he told the still-loyal-to-Hell part of himself that it was all ‘research’ to tempt souls more efficiently. Hastur couldn’t fool _all_ of himself, however - especially not with the burning pressure growing between his legs.

‘So, where do Dukes rank in Hell?’ She asked after he’d taken her through the concept of the lower-archy, embellished with anecdotes of Astaroth and Baal.

Hastur sniffed at the beer she’d gotten for him before they sat down together. It smelt bitter and akin to a sour fruit Crowley had made him eat in the 1820s, which he had embarrassingly referred to as ‘the forbidden fruit’.

‘We’re in the first order. Below the kings, princes, great dukes – and, of course, the Master himself.’ 

She nodded, mouth full of beer, with an endearing sort of fascination in her eyes, Hastur thought. Seeing her half-empty beer, he decided to take a mouthful. Though he smoked often, one of the only human indulgences he’d come to enjoy, he rarely set his sights on alcohol. That fact, combined with the face Hastur associated with the bitter, fruity flavour being Crowley’s, caused him to revile at the beer, pursing his lips in aversion and setting it back on the coffee table.

‘Not your cup of tea?’

‘It’s not tea, so obviously not.’

‘It’s a figure of speech. I just meant, did you not like it?’

‘Oh.’ Hastur paused for a moment, committing the idiom to memory. ‘No, I didn’t. I could get used to it, though.’

Hastur wasn’t entirely certain as to why he’d added that last part in; he was never that polite or accommodating. He thought about it some more, despite himself feeling rather concerned with his turn of character. Had he not wanted to see her upset? Offended? Through all of his pondering, he’d missed her last remark.

‘Sorry?’

‘I asked if you wanted something else. I’ll take the beer. I know that grapefruit isn’t for everyone.’

Hastur had an epiphany. ‘Grapefruit! That’s what that twat gave me – grapefruit. Called it _the forbidden fruit_. Silly bastard he _knows_ it was an apple; for Satan’s sake, he’s the one that tempted them.’

Laoise looked bemused. ‘Who’s the twat you’re talking about?’

‘Crowley.’

Her mouth made an ‘o’ and her eyes fell to her lap.

‘What’s the matter?’ Hastur asked, the same concern for her feelings plaguing his actions.

‘Crowley was the serpent?’

‘Quite right. About the only competent thing Mr. Slick’s ever done.’

This earned him a laugh, which he (in his own opinion) felt inordinately pleased with himself about.

‘Is he really that bad?’

‘Don’t get me started. About a decade ago, Ligur and I told him of our temptations for the day, and all he’d done with himself was cut some ‘telephone’ wires! Didn’t even know what he was bloody talking about.’

‘You don’t know what a telephone is?’

Hastur didn’t want to appear stupid. ‘I might. I think we have them in Hell. Do they ring?’

‘Yeah, you’ve got it. I think you know more than you give yourself credit for. You’re 6000 years old, after all.’

Hastur felt something he couldn’t articulate, not in arbitrary wavelengths in his mind, nor into coherent words. Instead, he let the pleasant feeling sit with him, banishing it when it occurred to him that he should feel guilty for indulging in anything nice.

‘I do know lots of things – but, as much as I hate to admit it, you taught me a considerable amount the last time I was here.’

Hastur glanced at her out of the corner of is eye, hoping she was picking up on his message. He knew, from 6000 years of getting what he wanted out of humans, that they were far easier to sway if you used doublespeak, and innuendos. Hastur couldn’t imagine why: there was nothing he hated more.

‘I could teach you some more, if you like.’

The pressure doubled down and he had to clench his legs to keep it from getting out of control. ‘Yes, I think I’d like that very much.’

At some point, the pair had closed the space between them, her looking up at him with eyes only inches from his own. It felt heavy, like the fabric of space and time splitting apart and collapsing in on them. Laoise had merely a few months’ worth of affectionate contact to fill herself with – Hastur had his whole life time.

For the second time, they found themselves in the bedroom. It was lighter in the room this time around, the setting sun reflecting against her neighbours’ windows glaring back through the curtains along with the pale-blue of the sky that tinted the room.

‘Was everything I did last time satisfactory?’

‘Everything you did last time was better than any human’s ever done it.’

The feeling expressed itself again; Hastur gagged it within himself by unceremoniously unbuttoning and tearing off her jeans and, with a hint of patience this time, her underwear. They were what Hastur expected humans called ‘pretty’, or ‘delicate’, with each thread and slip of fabric overlapping and crossing to beget floral patterns. He didn’t consider the lingerie for much longer, as he was drawn downwards by desperate hands around his neck.

She’d pressed her thighs together and was instigating him to focus on her upper body first.

‘Slow down. It’s much more rewarding if you savour it.’

Hastur heeded, allowing kisses to be pressed into his jaw, even conceding to having patterns traced on the small amounts of skin visible above the scarf. Her nails brushing his long-untouched flesh engendered a violent shiver throughout his entire corporation, so forceful that he pulled back from her touch.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, eyes widening with concern.

‘It’s fine. Keep going, I… I was enjoying it.’

She pressed her lips together and crawled near to him again, fingering at the surprisingly cottony scarf. She pulled it away from his neck, unravelling the folds until it slid away from his body, exposing a wealth of skin for her to bite and suck bruises into. The pain was gentle, almost frustrating for someone so used to enduring great deals of brutality and creative torture methods as Hastur was. When her fingers brushed along the tendons that flexed with each reluctant moan and sigh, she’d mumbled that he had a pretty neck. The word confused him, he didn’t know how to unpick the connotations it gave to be ‘pretty’. The frustration manifested in an unfamiliarly gentle manner as he slid his hands up her blouse, squeezing her hips as she crawled further onto his lap, gladly leaning up into the kisses she planted on his lips.

The hand she’d stroked across his throat travelled downwards, stagnating on his loose tie to undo it with some difficulty before throwing it next to the scarf, finally pressing on his dick.

‘You. Are. _Hard_ ,’ she breathed. Everything stood on end. His toes curled, begging for more stimulation, or some release.

Hastur growled as he had his way with her neck, clamping down on the skin with greater vivacity. He’d broken the skin. Iron clung to his lips and the tips of his teeth as he licked away the blood with his tongue, apologising gruffly into her skin. He shifted his hands from her hips to her waist, laying her down as she writhed at the cold-as-death touch.

Her mouth lolled open, whining moans and hitching breath escaping as Hastur moved down her body. He popped the buttons of her blouse, careful not to rip the material, until the white silk flowed open either side of her body as if he’d split her open right down the middle and her blood flowed white. Tense fingers grabbed hold of his wrists, her fingers nearly wrapping around the entire circumference. She put his hands atop her breasts, his palms hitting upon her erected nipples.

‘What do I – ‘

‘Massage them,’ she managed.

Hastur did as he was told, rubbing circles with his palm before kneading the docile tissue. He looked her up and down, entirely naked beneath him. It was rather a sublime sight – skin untainted with the golden flecks of angels or the blackened warts of demons. It was human, through and through. Blood flowed through her body, warming it to Hastur’s touch. It had muscles in its torso that flexed against his crotch as he straddled her, and in her arms and legs that twitched with pleasure. Hastur realised that he’d been wrong, at least in the case of Laoise. Humans rather weren’t God’s blandest creation: perhaps they were the most intricate of them all.

The philosophising didn’t last long. Soon, her fingers trailed down his torso and stripped him of the trench coat, her fingers finding a home on his scarred and torn torso, gliding closer and closer to the band of his trousers as gentle as wind through baby’s breath. The lack of strength or viciousness behind her touch drove him crazy, the teasing gropes and drags of fingernails stimulating him to the point of imploding.

‘Stop – just touch me.’

‘I am touching you,’ she said, tone coquettish; however, her voice still strained through the veil of her own arousal, and Hastur wondered if he had to put in more to get out more.

He cracked her thighs apart, setting to work on her labia as he struggled to pull his trousers down at the same time. He felt her trying to reach down toward his crotch to wrap her hand around his cock, but her arms couldn’t reach far enough as he levelled his sweating body to the duvet and flicked her clitoris with his tongue. She bunched the sheets between her two fists and tugged upon them with all of the force that she hadn’t used earlier, so strong that he felt the fabric shuffle beneath him.

‘Oh, _yes_.’

Her hands dug into his shoulders, pulling at the fabric of the unbuttoned dress shirt for some semblance of stability. The pressure from her fingers only spurred him on, kissing the insides of her thighs and tonguing at her vagina. His tongue slipped in.

‘Oh, Hastur, this is _unbearable_ …’ she whined as his mouth stroked back towards her clit, biting and licking and sucking and all and –

Something wet spilled onto his chin.

‘Jesus, I came already…’

She pulled herself upright, arms folded against her chest as her head clunked back against the headboard.

‘Is that a bad thing?’

‘No, Hastur, no, it’s an incredible thing. God, you got better. I didn’t even finish last time.’ She flashed a grin that, had she not been in such rapture, would’ve been somewhat conniving. ‘’ve you been having other humans?’

Hastur was disgusted at the thought, and even more alarmed that she’d considered that plausible for him.

‘Of course not! I would never – ‘

She pressed his chin between her forefinger and thumb, struggling to find the energy to push herself forward to meet his lips. ‘I’m only joking, Hastur. I’m just saying, it feels as if you’ve been practicing.’

Hastur tried his hand at the concept of ‘joking’. ‘I suppose I have an affinity.’

‘I’ll say.’

After catching her breath, her fingers found themselves once again on his waistband.

‘How about we see what we can do about _this_ ,’ she said, grabbing hard at the bulge.

‘Oh, Satan, please.’

He hadn’t the time to wait for her to fiddle around with buttons and fabric – this was desperate, he was desperate, gasping for a pull off like never before. With a snap of his fingers - something he hoped Beelzebub wasn’t tracking, as it would be considered ‘unnecessary expenditure’ – his trousers were lain haphazardly with the rest of his clothes. He knelt up in front of her, towering and slender, in nothing but a half-buttoned dress shirt that appeared singed at the bottom. It had been so long that the room was near monochrome black, the afterglow of sunset gone and no light from the sky painting the room.

‘Come here,’ she mumbled, voice oddly sweet and nurturing. As his face fell onto her outstretched hand he saw her face with more clarity, her expression one of yearning and flecks of something Hastur didn’t recognise – he couldn’t _feel_ it lucidly, either.

Demons, angels, all celestial beings, could feel emotions, perceive them as abstract wavelengths, as well as seeing them etched onto something physical, such as facial expressions and body language. Demons had a comparatively limited range of feeling, lest they relearn the sensations that they were robbed of in The Fall.

Hastur wondered what feeling had been stripped from him that she so clearly felt. He was left with inadequate time to speculate as a hand wrapped itself around his cock, folding around knuckle by knuckle, pulling it towards her groin while she guided his mouth to hers once more.

*

‘Can I stay?’

She was half way across the room when Hastur’s voice broke the long-held, after-sex silence.

Still naked, she turned to peer at him through the darkness to where he lay against her pillows. A small circumference of red glowed and burnt out, the smell of tobacco following close after.

‘Stay the night?’

‘Whatever you may call it.’

She felt a warmth inside, was it pride? She felt wanted, like not everything in life was destined to fall away from her.

‘Of course you can.’ She turned toward the ensuite once more, a thought nagging at her. ‘Hastur, are you going to be gone when I wake up?’

The cigarette lights up and burns out a few more times. She’s ready to acquit from the situation, still not quite as prepared for disappointment as she thought she’d be. This time she got to the door handle before she was interrupted again.

‘I don’t think so. I’ve got time.’

She was glad for the darkness to hide the self-gratified expression on her face. In and amongst all of Hastur’s apparent indifference, which somewhat dissipated during sex, she felt embarrassed of her interest in him – as well as the growing attachment.

‘That’s great. I’ve got plenty of time, too.’ 

Hastur made a noise of acknowledgment. She doesn’t head into the bathroom right away, despite the conversation having dried up. He took a few more drags of the cigarette before it doesn’t light again and the smell became less potent.

‘Are you okay?’

Pulled out of her transfixion, she gives a short hum before shutting herself in the bathroom, turning on the shower.

She regarded herself in the mirror: smudged rings of mascara around her eyes; hair frizzy and damp; bruises all over her upper body as well as the bitemarks on her neck; dried come spread across her chest. Wrinkling her nose, she wondered how something that felt so worth it at the time produced so much mess and inspired mild disgust after the fact.

As she was about to step into the shower she had a thought, possibly one of the better ideas she’d ever contrived.

‘Hastur?’ She called out, volume exaggerated by the acoustics of the small bathroom.

‘What?’

‘Do you want to take a shower with me?’

A longer pause than before. Again, as she was about to accept that Hastur had probably never cleaned anything in his life and was not about to start now, the bathroom door was swung open, clattering into the bedroom wall with a noise that indicated that there was _absolutely_ going to be a dent there.

‘Why do you look surprised? You asked.’

‘I know, it’s just… okay. Take your shirt off.’

‘Why?’

‘You have to take all your clothes off in a shower, to get all of your body clean.’

He wrinkled his nose, unbuttoning the last of his shirt and dumping it on the floor. Stepping back into the shower, she beckoned him in, amused at the confusion on his face.

‘It’s just water.’

‘Mm.’

The pair crammed into the built-for-one shower, almost on top of each other again and Hastur’s head dangerously close to the rack of shampoos and body washes.

‘What now?’

She reached behind his head to grab the most neutral-scented of her washes, Tesco’s own-brand coconut, and demonstrated lathering her body with the liquid. The scalding water clearing her skin of spittle and come and blood felt transcendental.

‘Is this something humans enjoy?’

‘I certainly do,’ she says, pumping more soap onto her hands to rub over Hastur. ‘Some don’t, though. Can’t imagine why.’

‘I think I can.’

She hums a laugh, opening her hands out to him. ‘Am I alright to do this? You don’t mind if I touch the…’

This was the first time she’d realised the extent of the scars and cuts on his body. Some were smaller, minor gashes; others could only have been done with great intent to harm, maybe even kill, and looked as if they took a long-time healing.

‘The what?’

‘All these scars. Hastur, what happened to you?’

He put her hands on his body, straight onto a mammoth gouge across his chest, collar bone to collar bone.

‘I am Fallen. I come from Hell. What did you expect? Just ‘shower’ me and stop asking questions.’

‘Sorry,’ she whispered, trying to hold it together as he turned his back on her. Much like the torso, it was riddled with lacerations and burns, the only difference being two symmetrical cuts tracing his jutting shoulder blades – and, somehow even more alarmingly, a raised scar, a burn, in the shape of what she imagined was a sigil.

‘I know you said no more questions, but what are these two cuts on your back?’

Hastur’s frantic breathing had slowed down. ‘Are they symmetrical?’

‘Mm-hm.’

‘They’re where my wings are.’

‘Can I see them? What do they look like?’

‘Mm, not for now, human. They’re not the prettiest. I think you’d be disappointed.’ Hastur finally turned around to face her again, letting her tend his front. She was almost glad she didn’t have to look at the burn mark anymore – it made her feel sick, her mind assuming the worst when wondering where it had come from. ‘I don’t think you’d like them,’ he added on, almost ashamedly.

‘I think I will.’

He leant down to kiss her, his hands slipping down the length of her arms as he tried to hold her. She laughed as she pulled away, prompting a small smile of his own. Satisfied and clean, she turned the shower off and opened the door for him.

‘After you.’

As they dried off, Laoise took a few more glances at his mutilated torso. The more he turned around to towel himself down, the more she realised that there really wasn’t much untattered skin left, aside from his neck and forearms.

‘Was the shower so terrible?’ She ventured in an attempt to distract herself.

‘Possibly not. I might need more evidence.’

Again unsure as to whether he was making a joke or not, she dropped the subject, almost keen to get him clothed to stop her mind from wandering and getting to curious about the marks, lest Hastur get defensive again. She understood; she had scars of her own that she’d rather not remember the origin of.

‘Ready?’ She asked, towel wrapped around herself as Hastur had gotten back into the dress shirt, rising just above his waist and leaving his lower half entirely exposed. He nodded, following her back into the bedroom.

The pair lay shoulder to shoulder in the bed. Hastur wore a stripped-down version of his usual attire, refusing her offers of conventional pyjamas. At least for the shower he smelt less of rot than he usually did.

It was the familiar after-sex awkwardness, neither party knowing how to make idle chit-chat after having their insides rearranged and every ounce of energy erotically tapped from them; putting it that way, Laoise supposed it was fair. She played with a loose nail, pretending to ignore Hastur turning his head to face her. With long fingers he pushed her hair from her shoulders and ran them along her jaw.

‘This is quite pleasurable.’

‘I’m glad.’

He cleared his throat, pulling on her jaw this time to make her eyes meet his own, hollow black ones. The lack of familiar detail – the irises with multifarious colours and pupils that dilate – was sort of enamouring in its own right.

‘I apologise for snapping at you. The scars are… a sore subject.’

‘Hastur, don’t worry about it. I can only imagine. You don’t have to tell me anything, I understand that there’s some parts of the worlds beyond this one that I’d be better off not knowing.’

He made a noise of agreement.

‘You can always ask me about Earth.’

Hastur’s eyes dropped, seemingly in thought. In the limbo she shuffled closer to him, chancing an arm draped over his waist. He flinched as her arm made contact, oblique muscles tensing before his body softened against hers.

‘What do you all do for fun?’

‘Depends who you ask. I like painting. I dance, badly, and I sing… also badly. But some of us go running or lift weights or read or plant things in gardens and get frustrated about it when they die.’

She trailed off, stunned by how much Hastur might have to experience.

He made a guttural sort of laugh. ‘We dance in Hell, too.’

‘You what?’

‘Yes, demons dance. We have occasional bursts of ‘fun’, mainly just to rub it in the angels’ face. None of the wankwings can dance.’

She had to mentally process this image before she could allow herself a satisfying cackle about it. How did Hastur dance? Was it anything humans could perceive? She decided to save the request for an unhappier moment.

‘Wow, okay,’ she breathed out through the tail end of her laughter. ‘That’s quite an image.’

‘It does get rather heated. Most of us do it for fun, but of course Crowley had to introduce ‘battles’ into it, and made it a competition. Bastard doesn’t have any joints in his body, so he always wins.’

They have dance battles in Hell? Do they know that that’s what they’re doing? She made it a point to remember to interrogate Crowley about this.

Her eyes prickled with exhaustion and an ache was growing in her abdomen. Closing the gap between her and Hastur, she felt slightly more settled than she had the first time this had happened, knowing that she wouldn’t spend days and days plagued with doubt wondering if he’d ever come back.

‘Are you sleeping?’

‘About to.’

‘Oh. Goodnight, human.’

He welcomed her against him by mirroring her arms, wrapping his own around her body and pressing tightly. He mumbled something about doing it correctly.

‘Hastur, do you sleep?’

‘Only by choice.’

‘Right. Well… sleep well? Or… lie awake-well. Whatever you do.’

‘I’ll try.’

*

She woke up to find Hastur with his eyes wide open, staring down at her. She jolted back but was held in place by his grip on her waist.

‘You sleep for a long time.’

Disbelieving the comment, as she rarely achieved more than five hours on a good night – and even less should she be working a night shift – she rolled over as far as Hastur’s arms would allow to see that it was nearly nine.

‘Fuck, you’re right. I don’t think I’ve ever slept for nine hours.’

Wriggling from Hastur’s hold on her, she figured it might do her some good to appear as if she had a functioning life to be going about; but, also, a functional life that she could conceivably include Hastur in on. She could just-so-happen to need new furniture for her apartment, despite not having adequate money or space, and need some help carrying it back…

‘Hastur, how would you like to go to IKEA?’

After the trials and tribulations of explaining what IKEA was and the human sacrament of the trip to IKEA, Hastur agreed, if only for ‘research purposes’, which she didn’t believe for a second. Again, she tried her luck at getting him into a taxi or an Uber, but to no avail – so, 40 minutes of walking through the final gasp of August sunshine later, they neared Regent’s Park.

‘I thought you lot liked nature. Why’s there all this stuff built up?’ Hastur remarked as the pair made their way through Fitzrovia.

‘You tell me. Feels like something your lot would’ve incentivised. You know, I thought nature was God’s thing. Seems sensible for you all to want it ruined by metropolis.’

Hastur gave a low growl, possibly of acquiescence. ‘I’ve never liked what I’ve seen up here since… I don’t know when.’

‘What was it like, you know, in the ancient times? Back when Socrates and the like were around.’

‘Eugh, Socrates. Irritating bloke, makes everyone in Limbo that little bit happier. I didn’t come to Earth then, though. Only got assigned here in the 1600s when all the Fallen Principalities starting weaselling out.’

‘What did they do?’

‘All sorts. Basically turned themselves into succubae, incubi. Some tried to retire and get away from Hell, but we made sure we got them back.’

The last comment drew out such a wicked smile from Hastur that Laoise nearly stopped walking. To contain herself, and the burning questions that it had evoked, she read the writing on the sides of the buildings. Liberal Judaism Centre. Montagu House. I Prospects. By the time they’d rounded the corner to where the IKEA showroom sat, she was calm again.

‘So, what do we do here?’ Hastur asked, possibly for the billionth time, as they looked up at the tall, glass building. It looked homely inside, despite being sterilised for show and strictly uninhabited. The wonders of marketing.

‘We look around at the nice rooms that they’ve made up and think ‘hey, wouldn’t this look nice in my house’, until you look at the price tag and realise that it really isn’t worth it to try and make it work.’

‘I will _never_ understand you.’

She craned her neck to look up at him to find he had already been staring down at her. He had a softer expression across his greyish countenance than usual.

‘That’s what you think. Come on.’

She tried something then – she extended her hand to see if he knew what to do with it.

‘What – what are you doing with your arm? Is it broken? Does it do it that easily? Upstairs must really hate you all to make you that deficient.’

‘Hastur, no – look, it’s functional. I’ve never broken a bone in my life.’

Hastur gave a sceptical look.

‘Do you know what hand-holding is?’

‘I’ve held hands before, yes.’

She sighed. ‘I’m talking still-attached to their possessors.’

‘Then no.’

She figured it better to show than to tell.

‘Why?’

‘It’s intimate. I like the feeling of your hand around mine. In a sort of perverse way, it’s about public displays of possession, but that depends on your attitude.’

‘So, it shows that I… own you? I don’t think that I own you.’

‘Well that’s… good. That’s reassuring. I don’t think of it that way, either. Just think of it as an extended form of intimacy, maybe something loving, but it’s acceptable to do it in public. It’s like me saying, ‘hey, London, I’m with him’.’

‘I think I understand.’

He curled his fingers, that had until then been stock-straight, around her own and squeezed.

‘Perfect. You’re a natural. Let’s go look at pricey kitchens.’

‘Still don’t get it.’

‘Neither do we, to be honest.’

Three storeys of carefully curated furniture in, Hastur, akin to a child, was beginning to drag his feet on the floor. Laoise couldn’t say that she didn’t understand. The showroom was boring her, everything out of her grasp and current motivation-level to take home and assemble into something that suited her fairly run-of-the-mill kitchen.

At some point, she couldn’t remember when, Hastur had pinned her to the wall behind one of the artificially-hung cabinets that seemed to float in the air, sinking to his knees behind the marbled counters.

‘What are you doing – ‘ she began, knowing exactly what was coming.

‘I’m bored.’

Her belt came undone. And then her buttons were popped open. Then her zip yanked down.

‘Hastur, we _cannot_ do this in _IKEA_!’

‘Don’t think I can’t feel your pleasure.’

Of course, in that moment, she didn’t know the true weight of what he meant. She thought he was just picking up on her obvious arousal through the pace of her breath and the trembling across her skin – it had been much more ascertained than that, to Hastur at least.

Without waiting for more confirmation, her jeans were pulled to her shivering knees, then came her underwear. Hastur peered up the length of her body to meet her dilated eyes. She nodded, and he got to work.


	5. The Cosmos, Time As Yet Undefined: I

Hasdiel dangled his feet from Paradise.

He’d never had feet before, let alone the rest of his corporeal form. He extended his arms, twisting and turning them before his eyes – my God, he thought, I have eyes. He waved his new hands through the air and a reflection of himself manifested within his palms, though the image was watery and unstable.

He studied it for a while. This was what She had called ‘the human form’, Her new creation; of course, with a few modifications to distinguish that they were celestial beings. He looked rather like a human, but with fairer skin and hair than had been given to Adam and Eve (apparently a feature of humans that would come later), and golden flecks underneath the hair that hung in front of his forehead. And the eyes. He hadn’t the same eyes as the other angels, at least from what he’d seen. They all had coloured circles in a pool of white: Hasdiel only had a sheen of the palest blue, encompassing the whole socket.

Hasdiel had heard some rumblings among a few of the Seraphim – even amongst some of his fellow Thrones – of displeasure, distaste, towards the changes being made. They didn’t like that they were forced to look akin to the humans; they didn’t like that they were made to worship the new stock; they especially didn’t like that She had deemed them ‘made in Her image’.

‘What does that make us, then?’ Hasdiel had heard Seraphim Lucifer cajoling the others one night, the first night that Heaven had been renovated (so to speak) into the great kingdom above the clouds – a physical place, with physical angels. ‘The prototype? Her practice runs?’

Hasdiel was intrigued. He couldn’t say that he didn’t disagree. The angels had always been told that they were cut from God’s very own celestial cloth. The Seraphim were forged from fire, one of the most valuable elements. If they weren’t the most important to Her, what did the humans have?

The angel gagged the thoughts. He couldn’t get wrapped up in that crowd. There had already been a warning aura cast down from Above following that first night, Uriel had told him as he headed to Venus one morning. She had a look of pure revulsion at the thought of a rebellion: the worrying thing for Hasdiel was that he struggled to feel reviled with any such vehemence.

He felt somebody walk up behind him. A hand laid upon his shoulder, nudging him to turn around.

‘Has.’

‘Lucifer.’

He took a seat beside Hasdiel on the cloud. Grumbling something, he pulled on his white sheet to further cover his arms.

‘Cherubium Raziel told me that you’d be a good fit for our… clandestine gathering.’

Hasdiel’s heart, should he have had one, would’ve sunk. This was just what he’d been avoiding – the temptation of a direct incentivisation was too strong.

‘I see.’

‘Do you know what I mean?’ Lucifer leaned closer.

‘Yes.’ Hasdiel snapped, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the expanse of sky below hm.

‘What do say, Angel of Benevolence? Wouldn’t it be oh-so benevolent to your fellow _anges_ to help get us justice? Correct me if I’m wrong, but outright replacing us and then making us _love_ our usurpers seems rather unbenevolent.’

Hasdiel’s chest constricted. It felt as if he’d been struck in the legs whilst trying to outrun a predator – a predator whom he wanted to be caught by.

Lucifer crossed his fingers. ‘Come _on_. You and Raziel are like that! It would be awful lonely up here with him gone.’

Hasdiel finally looked at Lucifer. ‘Gone? Where are you going?’

Lucifer rolled his eyes, an enviable green, and got up to walk around Hasdiel as he gesticulated with his arms. ‘Well we can’t stay here, can we?’

The seraphim’s voice rolled like thunder. It was one thing to have Uriel frustrated with him, but Uriel was only an archangel. Lucifer was one league beneath God, and could unfurl his body into fire at any moment he pleased.

‘I suppose not. Why not try and reform Heaven?’

‘Reform? Hasdiel, you are so naïve. So fanatical. You’ll be good to us, if we make you loyal.’

The last part was muttered, but Hasdiel got every word. Yes, he was dedicated, and yes, he hated change, and yes, that was often the subject of needling when the other angels were allowed to try the new alcohol. But here was Lucifer, telling him that those qualities could be utilised.

Lucifer knelt down to Hasdiel once more, grabbing him by the shoulders in a sickeningly fraternal manner. ‘Has, you are my chariot into battle. The protector of Venus, the Morning Star. That’s me. A war is coming, and very, very soon I’m going to need my chariot.’ 

With that he was gone, leaving behind a smouldering fire and precipitations of golden ash. He flinched at the noise and the blaze of light, but it intrigued him in a way that it hadn’t before.

Hasdiel waved his hands above the dying flames. It didn’t hurt one bit.


	6. I Have Always Found It Easier to Dream About It

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> much deserved Ineffable Husbands content. I loved writing this chapter.

Beelzebub licked their fingers clean. Gabriel, hair dangerously close to the wall of fire, reclined on the ground of the seventh terrace.

‘Good job on getting these guys cleared out,’ he commended.

‘It was nothing. Mainly because half of them ended up in the wrong circle of Hell, but time _was_ an object.’

Gabriel sat up, fully clothed again with a wave of his hand. ‘You’re all terrible, you know that?’ It was said with little conviction. 

‘Yes _zz_ , that is the whole point.’ They twisted around to look at him. ‘You lot aren’t so perfect yourselves. Need I show you the – ‘

‘Ah, ah. No. I don’t need the… the reminder.’

Beelzebub tugged their dress shirt back upon their shoulder, secretly thankful that they didn’t need to bare their scars to Gabriel. He hadn’t been the one to smite them, after all. As much as they were the Prince of Hell, it felt sort of wrong to make him bear the guilt of it.

‘You know, I purposefully avoided you during the War.’

It was said so quietly that it had almost gotten lost amongst the crackling of the flames. Beelzebub let the words sink in, the wind that berated them this high up the Mountain of Purgatory filling the silence.

‘I did, too.’ 

More silence. The two rarely had heart-to-hearts (not that either of them possessed a heart), and for good reason. The proceeding lack of conversation acted as a cleanse to the unwanted burden of true feelings.

‘I have to go check on the weekly miracle quota.’

‘I have to see who my demons have wiled, if anyone.’

Gabriel stood up, extending a hand that Beelzebub ignored. They brushed themselves off, looking at each other a final time before returning to their respective offices.

‘And get my legions ready to whoop your arses.’

‘Likely story, your _low_ ness. Same time next week?’

Beelzebub began to disappear, collapsing into the earth beneath them. ‘Fine. But choose a different terrace, the fire of chastity is really off-putting.’

Gabriel took a final look at the fire. They were right. There was something disquieting about hate-fucking somebody right next to the fire that lustful sinners had to brave to determine their eternal fate.

He called upon the Divine Lightning, and travelled along its wavelengths back home.

*

Beelzebub, back in their office, sat awkwardly on their office chair, legs swung over either of the arms. Other than the fact that they didn’t have to suffer the unpleasant or disturbing habits of numerous other demons, this was why they loved having an office to themselves. Other demons had to stoop over their desks; they could space out.

With an air of unwilful duty, they pulled the weekly quota of temptations and wiling from the input tray on their desk – good old Dagon with her filing, they thought. They got to work tallying up the temptations, curses, and other uses of power against each demons’ name.

_Crowley_ – 25: 13 people tricked with coins (?); 1 radio tower blackout (??); 10 counts of making waitstaff ‘forget to bring the bill’ (Beelzebub supposed they could count these ones as greed, or at least inciting poverty); 1 count of finding an address, no word of what happened to the poor soul that he found.

_Duke_ _Ligur –_ 72: 70 corruptions (Beelzebub just _wished_ he’d branch out, but they could let it slide, as governments everywhere were collapsing and spurring on war, famine, and death); 1 call to a game of Bloody Mary (not usually Ligur’s department, deserves commendation for taking one for the team); 1 count of arson against a monastery.

_Duke Hastur_ – 105: 50 priests tempted out of celibacy; 2 hotel receptionists and subsequently one hotel accountant wiled into embezzlement (ah, good, it’s been a while since a good Hastur embezzlement scheme); 26 counts of arson -

Beelzebub stopped. Something interesting was happening in Hastur’s record. Usually each and every one of Hastur’s deeds were cruel, and vile, and truly exemplar to Hell’s standards. But towards the middle of one week, and leading well into the next, were milder sins, almost Crowley-level nuisances. Some were even downright _helpful_.

Beelzebub read on.

1 summoning responded to; 1 alteration of corporation’s genitalia; 1 acquiring of base-level incubi knowledge; 15 counts of tantalising the attendees of a Hackney _Slimming World_ meeting into buying out a local café (provoking gluttony, Beelzebub recognised. That’s slightly more acceptable); 1 count of ‘leaving through the backdoor’; 1 acquiring of medium-level incubi knowledge; 1 attempt at recognising a forbidden emotion; 1 attempt at slumber; 1 attempt at recognising a forbidden emotion; 1 count of making the Lambeth and Westminster area a little less busy; 1 attempt at recognising a forbidden emotion; 1 call to being conveniently ignored by passers-by; 1 attempt at recognising a forbidden emotion.

(1 aborted deed: preparing to mend a broken arm).

Beelzebub’s head spun. Of course, Crowley wasn’t exactly evil incarnate, but at least he’d never gone this soft. Clearing up foot traffic? Dabbling in the incubi business? Possibly about to alleviate suffering?

Beelzebub knew _exactly_ what Hastur was up to.

*

They returned to her apartment empty handed, as she’d expected.

‘Wine?’ She suggested, remembering his response to the beer.

‘Sounds fine.’

As she fumbled around the kitchen, trying to assess what kind of wine a demon might be most inclined to, she caught a glimpse of the overflowing shelves in the storage cupboard connected to the kitchen. Peeking out from underneath the cloth she’d draped over them to conceal the mess was the Monopoly game she’d, for whatever reason, insisted taking with her when she moved out.

This, this is the quintessential human experience, she decided, and balanced the wineglasses atop the cardboard box.

‘I have something I want you to try.’

‘I’ve tried most every alcohol.’

‘I’m not talking about the alcohol.’

She thrust the glasses at him and proudly flourished the game in front of him.

‘What – what is that?’

‘Monopoly.’

‘I’ve heard of a monopoly. It’s what we helped you lot to create to spur on civil unrest and distrust in big businesses.’

Not for the first time around Hastur, she found herself gobsmacked. ‘No, not quite, but thanks for that. It’s a game. You basically have to, well, monopolise the board. That’s how you win. This game has led to _many_ a family argument.’

‘You want to argue with me?’

‘Trust me, not one bit.’ She began unfurling the game across the coffee table, sweeping remotes and books and coasters out of the way with her arms. ‘I just want you to try it.’

Laoise opened out the rulebook, putting an embargo on Hastur’s questions until she was finished.

‘I’m not seeing the point.’

‘Neither do most humans the first-time round. Trust me, no matter what, you’ll end up invested in hoarding properties and fake money.’

Hastur only glowers down at the board, picking up each character piece and inspecting it.

‘Come on, it’s just a bit of fun.’

‘‘Fun’s’ not my thing.’

She scoffed. ‘That is _not_ the impression I got last night. And in IKEA. I still can’t believe nobody saw us.’

Hastur gave his best conspiratorial smile before sighing and nodding his concession to ‘a bit of fun’.

‘Great. Pick a token.’

‘The stabby one.’

‘Naturally.’

Unsurprisingly, demons, especially Dukes, were rather easy to incite a thirst for power in, even when the stakes were only plastic properties and pretend money – and beside Hastur were stacks and stacks of each value of money, as well as almost every property card. Laoise didn’t even mind: she’d been proven right, after all.

‘Well, your Disgrace, you’ve thwarted me at Monopoly on your first go,’ she commended, tilting her wine as if in toast. Two empty bottles occupied the little remaining space on the coffee table, a half-empty third being nursed by Hastur as he’d given up with the courtesy of a glass; they were both very, _very_ , drunk. ‘Very well done.’

‘Greed,’ Hastur slurred out. ‘’S all greed.’

‘Too right. Bloody capitalist…’ she tutted, tipping back the remnants of her drink and started clearing up the game. She took a final look at the few spaces she’d salvaged – Fleet Street, Pall Mall, and Marylebone Station – before tucking the accessories away in the box for next time.

As she made her way back to the storage cupboard, Hastur reached up and grabbed her wrist from where he was slumped between the sofa and the table.

‘Stop rushing around, come sit.’

Laoise set down the box, and only allowed herself a self-satisfied grin when she’d settled next to Hastur, her face out of view. He abandoned the wine in favour of tentatively placing his arm around her shoulder, sliding her closer; she responded by settling her head into the warmth of his neck, produced by wearing that beige scarf all day. In this moment she forgot that the person she was so happily nestled against was a demon, a fairly high-ranking one at that. She decided to let her ignorance continue for however long this lasted – because if you couldn’t tell the difference, did it really matter?

‘I quite enjoy my time with you, even though you are a human.’

‘Likewise, demon.’

Laoise placed a hand on his wiry thigh, rubbing circles on the outer leg with her thumb, mirroring the uncertain strokes he was giving to her arm.

The usual question nagged at her, even in a moment that she should cherish for its noiseless pleasure and abundance of room to relax the constant tension in her body.

‘Do you have to go back, you know, down there, at any point?’

Hastur groaned, throwing his head back before bringing his cheek to rest on the crown of her head.

‘Incidentally, quite soon. I’ve got something quite important to do.’

‘ _Ohh_ , a man with status.’

‘Yes, I’m a Duke. You know this.’

No matter how many human initiations she could cram into one day, figures of speech and euphemisms appeared to be one aspect of the human imagination that needed more than a few affirmations – when it came to Hastur, at least. She was too out of it and enjoying her blissful haze to be bothered on corrections, for now, at least.

She mumbled incoherently as she leant further into him, incentivised into sapping every last ounce of intimacy out of that moment. A few more moments of silence, a few more deep breaths that wistfully became synchronised, a few more kisses placed here and there on each other’s bodies. Then Hastur unwound himself from her, pushing himself up with the heels of his palms.

‘So soon?’

‘I’m sorry. It’s an important job, but a quick one. In and out,’ he grinned, almost wildly. He wrapped the trench coat back around himself, straightening out the scarf. Not that she’d ever tell him, for fear of the demon taking offense to her terminology, but she thought that the scarf, neatly wrapped and tucked into his coat, was quite an endearing fashion choice.

‘I’ll be back.’

He stopped in the doorway and opened his arms out. She raised her eyebrows at him, unsure as to what his angle was. Is this what he had to do to make it back to Hell?

But he didn’t go anywhere. As she stood unmoving, he strained his arms out further, curling and uncurling his fingers as if beckoning her – oh. She felt embarrassed for taking that long to understand. He wanted a hug?

She closed the space between them and was enveloped in the tattered sleeves of his coat. Awkwardly, but very sweetly, he patted her back before pushing her off, holding her at arm’s length.

‘Until next time, human.’

_‘Á bientot,’_ she responded, just about catching the confused expression on Hastur’s face as he flicked his hand in the air, producing a curling cloud of black smoke that he appeared to become one of, evaporating within it. A handful of tan feathers fell from the final tendrils of the smoke.

*

Even walking the corridors of the Underworld with Ligur, both of them postured as if they possessed all the power in Hell and the kingdoms thereof, Hastur had never been less excited to be in Hell.

It wasn’t only that he missed her, of course he did, it was what he was there do to; and he couldn’t _stand_ Ligur’s jubilant attitude towards it, either.

‘This is what we’ve been building towards, Hastur. The glorious triumph that awaits our legions is on the other side of this door – and _we_ get to release it. Us!’

Hastur gave a weak laugh. Yes, the glorious triumph that will destroy Earth. Of course, that wouldn’t be a problem, should Laoise not have existed, and had she not been mortal.

But she existed, and was mortal, and no matter who won the Great War, she would perish amongst the rest of God’s subjects. Fantastic. Leave it to Hastur, one of the most loyal and fanatical demons in Hell, to develop a qualm about it.

Ligur’s hand groped the lock on the door until his knuckles blanched. Hastur swallowed thickly, the arms of the toad upon his head twitching as a subtle manifestation of his growing distress.

‘The time is upon us,’ Hastur tried to announce with even an iota of glee. ‘As soon as the boy names the hound, Armageddon will begin.’

What would have been said, in times past, as merely a convenient fact of the Hellish triumph to come was now uttered as Hastur’s final lamentation before he swiftly destroyed the strange joy he’d only held for a week, and would only hold for a week more, at most.

‘Go. Find your master,’ Hastur ordered the Hellhound, resigned to the only certain outcome of this he knew, as much as he liked to purport the inevitable victory of Hell: innocent Laoise’s demise, caught between a petty battle of celestial sibling rivalry.

The wandering souls of Hell shrieked and thrust themselves out of the way of the ravenous Hellhound as it bounded through the destitute halls, not least stopping to rip some limbs off here and there, and generally cause mayhem. Hastur thought the scene was quite premonitory.

*

‘Oh, Angel, how’ve we cocked up this _bad_ ly?’

Crowley flitted around the bookshop, stopping himself at every corner when he got the urge to smash a lamp or send a shelf cascading into another like a very large, very infuriated game of dominoes.

Aziraphale perched neatly on the sofa, mug of tea nursed between his hands as he panicked in a very orderly fashion.

Crowley knelt in front of him, in a rare display of desperation ripping off his sunglasses, and pleaded with his serpent eyes. ‘How can you just sit there? Ohhh, we’re in it now. We’ve really done it. Not only… ohh, Satan,’ Crowley rubbed his eyes, shooting back up again and pacing the floor. ‘Not only have we basically ensured that the apocalypse is happening, despite five years of swanning around in an awful perm and telling a _completely normal boy_ to kill snails – but we’ve cocked up Armageddon for _every single_ celestial being in higher management. Oh. Oh, ho, ho, they’re going to be so _fucked off_ when they realise.’

The demon bit his knuckles as he stood, back turned on Aziraphale, the golden light of the oncoming gloaming backlighting his – really quite nice, according to Aziraphale – figure.

Aziraphale proceeded to say nothing, his attention turned to something on the other side of the door. Crowley snapped back around, enraged by the angel’s far-off gaze.

‘Are you even listening? Why am _I_ the one panicking about gettin’ into trouble, you’re the bloody angel, for Satan’s sake! At least give me something.’

Aziraphale set the tea down on the table beside him. Without looking away from the door, an out-of-place and unconvincing smile spread across his mouth, he began: ‘Crowley, Laoise is at the door this very moment and if she so much as hears a _snatch_ of what we’re talking about she is going to be mad. As. Hops.’ Aziraphale flexed his fingers at the door to welcome her in, flashing his eyes dangerously at Crowley as she pushed through the door. ‘So _please_ , dear boy, _shut up_.’

Crowley got the message. He grinned wide at Laoise, which was an expression that all but convinced her that everything was just fine.

‘What’s going on, guys?’

‘Nothing!’ The pair answered brightly, snapping their heads to glare at each other for the very cliché indicator that something very much was going on. Spending 6000 years together had its downsides for sure, and one of them happened to be synchronicity.

‘Right. Well, I haven’t seen you both in a few days so I thought I’d pop round.’

Crowley, knowing full-well that Hastur had left her to release the Hellhound, knew that this visit was more of a void-filler than a general check-up, but he had more pressing things on his mind to be enraged about, or at least mildly offended by.

‘Always a welcome sight,’ Aziraphale said diplomatically.

‘Yes,’ Crowley harmonised, lisping the sibilant sounds.

The store plummeted into a guarded hush. Crowley continued to grin wildly while Aziraphale reverted to his reticence, collapsing into the corner of the sofa while sipping at the tea.

‘Seriously, guys, what’s wrong?’

Crowley erupted into an awful moan, sunk to his knees, and cradled his head between his hands.

‘Oh, _Crow_ ley…’ Aziraphale started to scold, but the demon’s wailing dirge overtook the soft-spoken angel.

‘Laoise, we’ve fucked up big time,’ he confessed, scooting over to her on his knees, getting jammed against the rugs.

She looked as if she were about to jump backwards, which Aziraphale wouldn’t have blamed her for, but she held her ground.

‘What’ve you fucked up? Like, Earthly fuck-ups, or…’ she shut her eyes. ‘Grand-scheme-of-things fuck-up?’

‘Grand-scheme,’ the two answered, again simultaneously.

‘Wonderful. How bad – ‘

‘End of the world bad,’ Crowley burst out before Aziraphale could stop him.

This time she did stagger backwards, her hand just gripping a low-sitting bookshelf to break her fall. The pair got up from their positions, making their way over to her while conversing – in quite colourful terms – with their eyes.

‘We’ve basically ensured Armageddon,’ Crowley explained, the alarming confession producing a dichotomy between words and actions as he cradled her head and helped her upright.

‘Oh, Jesus…’

‘Quite the opposite,’ Aziraphale joked weakly, getting an over-the-glasses glare from Crowley.

‘Not now, Angel.’

‘Sorry.’

They got Laoise situated comfortably on the couch, Crowley answering her questions as vaguely as demonically possible as Aziraphale brewed tea.

‘So, what happens during Armageddon?’

‘Big fight. Big, big fight, much bigger than the first one, because we demons are _angry_.’

The remark seemed to mock the other demons, and Crowley absolutely was. On paper, as a doctrine, Armageddon was fine – but to have it really happen? Crowley would have to lose all of this; humanity, the Bentley, not ever having to see Hastur, Aziraphale…

‘Best not to think about it.’

‘How can I not? I’m going to _fucking die,_ ’ she chastised, finding the strength to lean forward to get in Crowley’s face. 

He threw his hands up to push her back, really not amicable towards getting disciplined by a human when he was going to have to deal with the wrath of Beelzebub, and possibly Satan himself, on Saturday when Hastur couldn’t find the boy.

It was a stupid thing to say, Crowley knew it as soon as it left his mouth, but he said it anyway. ‘Hastur just released the Hellhound.’

‘He _what_?’

‘Yep,’ Crowley slithered out from her leering stature, pulling himself up to his full height once he was off the sofa. ‘Literally the very thing that starts Armageddon.’

‘He wouldn’t…’

‘Oh, he would. I really don’t know who you’ve been seeing, but it’s definitely not the Hastur I’ve spent 6000 years dealing with. Hates humanity. I’m quite amazed at the hold you’ve got on him – ‘

She shot up from the couch, shielding her face and gathering her things. ‘Just shut up, Crowley. I don’t think I know who I’ve been seeing, either. I’ll be off, you know, to savour my last three days on Earth.’

‘Angel and I’ve got a plan!’ He tried, but he couldn’t hear any returning footsteps.

As soon as the bell jingled to announce her absence, Crowley hissed all sorts of curses to himself for all sorts of reasons.

‘Where’s Laoise, dear?’

‘I might’ve… said some things.’

‘Crowley! What could’ve been worse than ‘you’re dying on Saturday’?’

‘Maybe: ‘your demonic boyfriend is the one who’s started the very thing that will kill you’…’

‘ _Crowley!’_


	7. Feeling Weird, Tasting Sweet

Realistically, she should’ve known who’d be waiting on her doorstep after she’d been out getting egregiously wasted with a few old friends to celebrate the second-to-last night of the rest of their lives – not that any of them bore the burden of that knowledge.

‘Fuck off, Hastur,’ was the laconic reply she decided on after staring at him with all the venom she could muster.

‘What?’

‘Crowley told me. About Armageddon. About the Hellhound.’ She stopped unlocking her door and looked him dead in his empty eyes. ‘That you wilfully started the _end of my fucking life_.’

‘Laoise …’

‘Don’t! Don’t use my name. God…’ she pushed through the door, legless with all the drink. She didn’t close it on his face, however, and didn’t even tell him to bugger off when he followed her through, politely closing the door behind him and putting it on the latch as he’d seen her do before.

‘Whatever Crowley told you… he doesn’t know how I’ve changed.’

‘If you really changed you wouldn’t have started the apocalypse.’

‘I didn’t have a choice!’ He shrieked.

Her bag slid from her shoulder as she stared bewildered at the outburst of emotion. He placed a finger between his teeth and began to gnaw, lightly at first, but then broke skin and drew viscous, murky blood far faster than a human would be able to.

‘Hastur! Hastur, hey, don’t hurt yourself – ‘

‘You’ve seen my body, the marks and burns. What do you _think_ happens to disobedient demons, you _fool_?’

Laoise wasn’t sure if demons cried. His voice had the correct warble and quiver, but his eyes looked no more lachrymose than usual. Regardless, being as human as she was, the display of such emotion and despair resonated with her, and made her more malleable to Hastur’s cause.

Hooking an arm around his waist, the other hand rubbing his chest, partly to anchor herself to the feeling of the bumps and ridges of his scars, she held him as close as he would allow – which was, despite his histrionics, as close as possible. She even shushed him, no longer concerned about the consequences of infantilising a demon.

‘I don’t want you to die.’

‘Neither do I, if you’d believe it.’

‘I do.’

‘Good. Then you can see how I’d be upset about this, no?’

She felt him nod, his chin bumping against the top of her head.

‘But you have to understand, human, I might’ve been sent to the ninth circle for treachery, ripped apart by my Master for eternity. They might’ve even used,’ Hastur appeared to bite back bile, ‘Holy Water…’

‘What does that do?’

Silence.

‘You’d certainly never see me again.’

They curled up together on the couch, Hastur’s head laid upon her chest. She held the hand of the finger he’d taken a chunk out of, massaging the knuckles with one hand and holding a Kleenex around the wound. The interaction had sobered her significantly, and made her redirect her anger towards the Grand Scheme of Things, rather than Hastur, who was now seeming more like a helpless lackey than bringer of the end of days (that title belonged to the Antichrist, he explained).

‘Who is the Antichrist, then? Crowley wouldn’t say.’

‘He talks a lot of old rot, even when he’s not speaking… an American boy, called Warlock. I’m supposed to greet him in Megiddo on Saturday,’ Hastur admitted sheepishly, as if he were afraid of incurring her wrath again. To show that she was, though struggling to do so, not that mad about it, she pressed a kiss to his hair, squeezing his hand.

‘I’d do anything to make this stop.’

Laoise nodded, pondering what the end would be like – but then she remembered something Crowley had said.

‘Hastur... I know you and Crowley have some ‘bad-blood’, but what would you say if I told you that he and Aziraphale had a plan to put a stop to all this?’

‘I’d say that they’re both so incompetent that they’d probably just move Armageddon forward a few days.’

She found it in herself to laugh. ‘I’m serious, though. When I left the bookstore, Crowley told me that they had a plan. It’s worth a shot, at least, right?’

Hastur considered, pushing his head further into her chest. ‘Alright. I suppose. It’s better than nothing.’

‘That’s the spirit,’ she praised him, followed by a kiss to his cheek. She stroked his back, one hand still clutching the tissue to the mangled finger. It made her feel ill that he could’ve done that to himself.

She bit the bullet. ‘Where’s the burn from, Hastur?’

His body froze atop hers. He appeared to stop breathing.

But he answered. ‘It happened about 5000 years ago.’

She was in no rush - assuming he answered before Saturday – so she let him soak in all the time and breathing room he needed.

‘It was one of the seven Princes – Belphegor.

‘I had just fallen – well, about 800 years in Hell, but that’s nothing when you’ve been alive this long. I fought alongside Lucifer himself in battle, I was his chariot, but I was still uncertain.’

‘What does it mean, to be a chariot?’

He sighed. ‘I was a Throne before I fell. It’s why I’m a Duke, now. The lowest of the Highest Order. In battle I was a conduit, I protected Lucifer. Because he’s Venus, you know. The star you see in the morning. It took a long time for me to remember, but I was once the Angel of Venus; ergo, the Angel of Lucifer. In a way.’ 

‘Wow.’

‘I know, I wouldn’t expect you to really understand – but I was very close to Lucifer. Now I hardly see him. I haven’t seen him since he took his new form, actually. Anyway – Belphegor wasn’t content with how I reprimanded the Fallen Principalities – Hell’s agents on Earth – for doing a bad job. I was too soft – which is ironic, coming from Belphegor, considering he tempts with laziness. So, I spent months in a torture chamber at the hands of Belphegor, Astaroth, Abaddon. Whoever wanted a go on me, really.

‘That was the mark I got on the final day, I believe. They’d figured out that I had amphibian skin as opposed to reptilian skin, which is much less resilient to heat. They stuck a poker with Belphegor’s sigil on it into Hell-fire until it glowed white as Heavenly walls and cast it onto my back. They held it there until I lost consciousness, probably even after. I still feel the heat.

‘Anyway. That’s why I am the way that I am. Fanatical, Crowley’s called it. I fear the wrath of Head Office, so I do what Head Office tells me to do.’

Laoise was astounded. Hastur didn’t seem like the kind of demon to fall prey to others – he seemed far too traditional, and loyal. She supposed she’d gotten an apt explanation for why that was.

There was nothing left to say. She could only hope that her physical comfort was comfort enough.

‘You can stay the night, if you’d like.’

‘You aren’t angry with me?’

She considered, despite knowing the answer. ‘No. You did what you have to do, and I trust that you’ll try to change it.’

Hastur recoiled. ‘Don’t get your hopes up, human. The powers of Satan, even extending to his son, are quite inconceivably strong. It’ll take quite the power to overcome it, power I doubt that Crowley, or the angel, or even I have, to overcome it.’

‘I won’t,’ she lied, brute-forcing her way into an optimistic and naïve outlook in a fundamentally human manner.

They lay still and taciturn for almost another half hour. By the time Hastur spoke again, she’d carded her way through each strand of his dryish hair, combing out dirt and other pieces of grit caught in it. She reasoned that it was a pathetic excuse for her inability to articulate any sort of adequate response to the Hellish trauma he’d spoken of, the simple human comfort of playing with someone else’s hair.

‘I know you invited me to stay the night, but I must decline. Time is of the essence. I better go see Crowley about this ‘plan’ of his.’

He sat up, allowing her to feel the ache in her body from sitting still for so long. She stretched out, by which time he’d rushed to the door.

‘Do your best,’ she said, although he was already halfway out the door.

‘Nothing less,’ he affirmed, gone as swiftly as he’d come.

*

Banging at the door was interlaced with the buzzing sound of the doorbell ring. Crowley knew that this was one of two people.

‘Crooooowleyyyyy…’ reverberated through the hallways of the apartment block.

Scrambling out of bed, just about ready to sleep through the end of the world if he could get away with it, he jammed his finger into the intercom. ‘Duke Hastur? Drunk, are we?’

‘Wh- where’s your voice coming from? Let me in, you snake.’

‘Not with that attitude, Duke Hastur.’

‘ _CROWLEY._ ’

‘Right-o.’

He buzzed the demon in, settling in his grandiose chair in wait for the Duke. He was almost certain that Laoise had blown him off, on the back of Crowley’s word, and Hastur was here to at the very least discorporate him as revenge. He gripped the arms of the chair in preparation for anything (in theory).

Hastur, oddly polite, knocked at the door to the main room. Crowley scoffed to himself, marvelling at the sudden change in Hastur’s demeanour. Before, like when he lived in the guesthouse of Elizabeth Cavendish’s mansion, Hastur had just burst right in. ‘Come, in your Disgrace.’

Hastur shuffled in, eyes flitting around the apartment, either casing it for traps or out of pure curiosity of how the domesticated-demon lived (getting tips, maybe?).

‘I’m told you’ve got a plan.’

‘Oh, so Laoise _is_ on speaking terms with you.’

‘Yes, no thanks to you. Why did you tell her about the Hellhound, Crowley? I thought you wanted me to live like you.’

Crowley groaned, never exactly sure of what he wanted. ‘I suppose. She deserved to know the truth, though, Hastur. It worked out, didn’t it? You haven’t evaporated me on sight, so I’m assuming you’ve got her under your thumb still.’

Hastur paced forward. ‘It’s not like that, Crowley. I haven’t tempted her, or wiled her, or done anything underhand.’ He glanced around the room again. ‘And _yet_. I haven’t evaporated you _yet_.’

Crowley pushed himself out of the seat, more like a throne, if you’re going for the narcissistic angle. ‘Keep it that way,’ he implored as he moved towards Hastur, then diverting his path to get himself a drink. ‘Want anything? I’ve got some very old _mead_ I think you’d like.’

‘Ha-ha. Funny. I drink just like you do Crowley, now spit it out. I need Armageddon halted just as much as you do. Two demons are better than one, if I’m not mistaken.’

‘Oh, how I wish you were,’ Crowley said under his breath, words further concealed by the clinking of cut glass and fluid pouring. ‘Look, Hastur, our distrust is mutual. Just trust that I have this all under control.’

‘You and the angel…’ Hastur needled.

Crowley stopped so suddenly that the bottle of bourbon clamped within his fist shattered with the tension.

‘Fuck…’ he muttered, thankfully distracted by the bloody mess on his hands and the alcohol spilt everywhere.

‘Yes, I know about him. Don’t worry – you’ve got plenty of leverage against me, should I go to Head Office about wankwings, and vice versa.’

Hastur’s grin was cruel, conniving, manipulative. Crowley refused to let his eyes wander above it to meet his gummy eyes.

‘Stay out of it Hastur. _We’_ ll handle this. Enjoy your time with Laoise, should I be _so_ incompetent this time around,’ Crowley hissed, squaring up to his superior.

Hastur puffed his chest right back. ‘I’d advise you work on your capability. _Ciao._ ’

Crowley felt the breeze from Hastur’s disappearance, almost being knocked back with the sheer anger and frustration of his aura. Running a hand down his face, he realised that Hastur was still unaware of the misplaced Antichrist, and how that _may_ come to bite him in the arse. Oh, well. Maybe he wouldn’t be alive to see it.

He swirled his hand above the shattered bourbon bottle, mending it conveniently, before rushing out the door to seek out Aziraphale again.

*

Simultaneously, on the other side of the Thames, a similar sort of drama was unfolding.

In the event that the apocalypse should strike in two days’ time, Laoise began tying up any loose ends. She threw out old papers and other miscellaneous things that she’d hoarded unnecessarily over the years; if Crowley and Aziraphale’s plan worked, at least she’d have a cleaner house, moving forward.

She reconnected with friends, family, which was a bittersweet idea. It reminded her just how much she’d lose – her mother texted her back, and she cried, and cried, and cried, until the entire infrastructure of the apartment rattled with a bellicose banging at the door. The strength was inhuman – was it Hastur, upset that it hadn’t worked, or elated that it had gone as planned? Or Crowley, even Aziraphale…

Tears catching on her cheekbones and webbed between her eyelashes, she flung open the door, in hindsight, with a tad too much approachability. 

A woman about her height stood on the other side of the threshold, adorned in a blazer and rather decorated with military medals and sashes. She had a Joan Jett hairstyle that Laoise always wished she could’ve pulled off.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, Miss Molony, is it?’ The sweet disposition dropped in an instant, replaced by a grimacing face and a lisp that sounded like a fly’s incessant drone. ‘I’m Beelz _zz_ ebub. We need to talk about your rec _zz_ ent… undertakings _zz_.’

Beelzebub. Hastur had spoken of them before. She was now in the presence of a demon much higher than Hastur and Crowley, and one with a distinctly lower regard for humanity. In trying to shut the door in their face, the demon snapped their fingers, and the door was cast violently into the table behind it.

‘I wouldn’t s _zz_ hut the door on me. Not now. Not ever.’

The buzzing continued, even when the demon didn’t speak. They backed Laoise further into their hallway, pressing her against the banister, the grooves digging into her back.

‘What do you want?’ Laoise said, pretending to possess any semblance of strength.

‘I want one of my top demons _zz_ back. He was _zz_ s _zz_ o bloody _loyal_ ,’ Beelzebub struck the top of the banister so hard that it flew off, shattering to pieces in the doorway of the kitchen. Laoise was mortified, wondering if the Prince would do that to her own head. ‘The harbinger of Armageddon. Spotless demonic record.’

‘Except for 5000 years ago, according to you lot,’ Laoise sneered, trying to pull herself up to her full height only to be beaten back down to a painful squat as Beelzebub pulled closer to her.

‘We don’t s _zz_ peak of that. It taught him a good old lesson. A lesson you’ve undone.’

‘What’s the point? What’s the point in coming after me?’

‘Satan, you lot really are s _zz_ tupid. With you gone, there’s nothing to hold onto here. Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, wherever you go, you’re untouchable by the Great War. With you out of the equation,’ Beelzebub explains, tucking a strand of hair behind Laoise’s ear, ‘Hastur will happily throw the towel in and blow up the moon – well, figuratively speaking. We don’t care about the moon.’

Laoise squirmed. The only thing in the way of her and freedom was that damn step that stuck out in front of the banister. Her shin bumped cruelly against it each time she thought she had enough room between her and the demon to dash for the open door. There was no way out, and Beelzebub was honing in.

‘I want my war, girl; Gabriel wants his war; the boy’s father wants. His. War – and we’ll get our war. I know about Hastur’s treachery. He’ll be sorted in due course; but I need him to prep the boy, first.’

‘He’ll do that with me around, he said it himself, literally just before you came.’

Her voice was choked and sounded tearful. She felt nothing short of pathetic.

‘He’d subvert it. You know he would. No use lying to me.’

Beelzebub huffed, rolling their eyes. Suddenly, they looked bored, the change from intimidation to detachment being alarmingly abrupt.

‘I’m a little bit tired of explaining this to you, you know.’

‘Then leave.’

Laoise was backed up a little further.

‘I’ve got a job to do. Satan-mandated.’

Laoise rolled her eyes, the final thing she would do. ‘Oh, right, like you ever see him.’

That was enough for Beelzebub. They thrust out an arm, slamming into Laoise’s neck and crushing her fatally against the wooden handrail. Light emanated from the human, light remnant of Beelzebub’s long-forgotten Seraphim fire, beginning from her throat, the point of contact, eventually slicing upwards to disintegrate her head, her chest, her torso, and her legs. The spirit spiralled downwards like a tornado drilling into the earth as the corporeal form of Laoise collapsed limp and lifeless, body unnaturally bent and broken across the step.

The Prince of Hell, the demon of Envy, poised two fingers in the air and pressed them to the softest part of the human’s neck, just above her collarbone. Nothing beat, nothing flexed through the slowly-cooling flesh to bite at Beelzebub’s fingers.

Laoise was satisfactorily dead.

*

Laoise opened her eyes. She felt as if she’d been out for a while, but was not well rested, judging by the stinging tiredness in her eyes.

The world around her was decidedly grey. Grey, with a touch of muted green spiralling above her in the form of what looked like overhanging tree leaves.

Her arms jerked outward at an unnatural speed, slapping the floor only to be met with the gritty texture of dried grass and dirt. She tilted her head to the side. It was grey, grey, grey all around. A few people walked by in togas – they looked not human, but more like a Victorian etching come to life.

She stared down her nose at herself. She looked to be in fairly modern clothes, but it was still a shapeless dress that left her scantily clad. Again, a dark grey. Her skin didn’t possess the peachy, human quality it once had, she observed as she bared her naked arms before her, the fabric at her shoulders pooling down to her neck – which itself ached as if she had a sore throat.

Grey.

Laoise hazarded to sit up. The world around her was a vast field, surrounded by old-looking, overgrown trees with foliage that swung down to scrape the messily-cut hedges. People with bald heads and waterfalls of beards reclined against them, chattering solemnly.

‘Hello?’ She called out, garnering the attention of the group closest to her. There were three of them, all disconcertingly familiar.

‘A newcomer…’ one of them muttered, although in a language that sounded dead. Curiously, she could understand every word.

‘Hello?’ She repeated, this time getting up with shaking limbs, struggling to keep herself upright. Laoise walked towards the group, beginning to recognise the men’s faces, though she didn’t want to admit to herself exactly _who_ she recognised.

‘Welcome, woman. Come sit.’

Socrates. That man was _definitely_ Socrates. As Hastur had said, he had the most positive aura of the entire area. A feeling of dread clung around her throat, and a memory crept back into her mind, only to lose its grip as she focused on the men again.

‘Socrates?’ She asked outright, deciding that this was not the right time for subtlety. Thankfully, the man in question gave a hearty laugh, while the other two sat in effected misery.

‘Quite right you are. Really, come sit.’

Ancient Greek. She was hearing, and understanding Ancient Greek – from Socrates, no less.

She took a seat on the dried grass once more, repressing a growing hysteria as she clocked what was happening.

‘You’re not another tourist, are you? That bastard Virgil really made a spectacle of himself there.’

‘Plato?’

The new speaker nodded. She felt as if she was going to vomit.

‘But really, if you’re after the Dante experience, the buck stops here. Made up all that other stuff. Virgil just told him what was in the other circles and he ran with it.’

She shook her head, afraid to speak.

‘That’s alright then. Well, welcome to Limbo.’

‘You seem a bit young to be here,’ the third noted. If she had to name one more long-dead philosopher, she’d surely pass out.

‘Limbo? As in… oh. Oh, _fuck_ …’

The three men laughed with varying degrees of conviction and humour while she felt her face tingle as the blood ran out of it.

‘Yes, it’s always quite upsetting to realise,’ Socrates smirked.

‘No shit,’ she said, the landscape spinning around before her as the world went black again.


	8. The Cosmos, Time As Yet Undefined: II

10 million angels from each of the nine celestial orders congregated in a corner of Heaven that Lucifer had manage to sequester right from under Her nose.

Hasdiel wore a face as warlike as the Angel of Benevolence could muster, the stern and bloodthirsty expression betrayed by shaking limbs and an incessant internal monologue of _turn back now_.

Raziel appeared beside him, nudging his side to get his attention. His eyes flashed through a multitude of colours, signifying his excitement, his rage, his impatience.

‘When’s this thing starting?’ Raziel hissed, met with only a shrug from Hasdiel.

‘Is this all of us?’ Hasdiel returned, surveying all of the familiar faces that were beginning to darken with a sort of grime, the gold signifying divinity fading into their skin, as the time grew nearer. He cast a hand beneath the hair that hung into his face, feeling for the bumps of gold that resided there, only to be met with smooth skin. He then felt down to where they scattered across his cheekbones – nothing.

‘I think so. About half of Heaven’s arsenal. Good luck to those other pandering fools. We’re angry. Can you feel it, Hasdiel? Can you feel anger?’

As soon as Hasdiel thought about it, something like a soundwave blew through his body. It was all-encompassing and rung stubbornly through his body. _That_ was anger. He’d never felt this before, only the feeling of slight injustice spurred on by Lucifer. Gathering himself from the shock of the force, he rubbed his temples and nodded at Raziel.

‘Here comes Kokabiel…’ Raziel muttered, turning away from the oncoming angel and occupying himself with Baal, one of Lucifer’s closest confidents.

In a flurry of limbs and long, curling red hair, Kokabiel bounded in front of Hasdiel. They’d built Venus together.

‘Alright, Has? Ready for the big one?’ He grinned, although he was making it even more obvious than Hasdiel that he wanted out of all this.

‘Certainly.’

‘Oh, Has, always so stoic. You’re gonna need to get angry for this one, I’m telling you. Liven up!’

Kokabiel’s effected enthusiasm was embarrassing for both of the angels.

But there it was again, the _anger_. Hasdiel thought about it, but nothing happened – nothing quite as strong as Raziel’s aura had produced, anyway. It was weak, like a breeze; a breeze that still conveyed a mild discontent, but not quite the sonic boom of profound injustice.

By the ruffle of Hasdiel’s white hair, Kokabiel knew that Hasdiel knew how he really felt. The Angel of the Stars lowered his eyes, kicking at an escaping tuft of white cloud.

‘I’ll see you on the battlefield,’ Kokabiel muttered, his arrogance shot dead as the noise within the dense crowd of growingly-impatient angels increased in volume by magnitudes. The red-haired angel stalked away, hands clasped behind his back. Hasdiel wondered how he’d get on, wherever they all ended up when this was over.

More of the cloud the angels stood on began to disintegrate, accompanied by a rumbling from below them. Lucifer shot up through the middle of the congregation, blowing the condensed water vapour all around as he hovered above them all. He was no longer in his corporation: he was made entirely of flames that licked the heads of all his army.

‘The rebellion begins today. We march on Heaven. We win. Angels, take your thrones.’

With that laconic ‘battle-cry’, there was a rush to split off into their roughly-estimated platoons. Hasdiel struggled to keep his footing as furious corporations evaporated into balls of light, or fire, or smoke all around him, kept upright only as one of Lucifer’s fiery tendrils threaded around his shoulders.

‘Throne Hasdiel. Shall we ride?’

Whether it was the heat from the fire cutting through his body, or the sheer pressure of millions of incensed angels compacting all around him, Hasdiel finally felt himself embody the free-will, long forbidden to angels, to feel each and every ounce of vindicated rage.

‘We shall,’ he gnarled, the light tint on the world that his pale eyes provided him turning darker and darker the more that Lucifer’s fire encompassed him.

10 million vague forms of energy burst through Heaven, almost instantly apprehended by an equal army of angels still in their corporeal forms, their energy infinitely calmer and graceful in the face of orbs that flitted around the air chaotically.

Hasdiel felt Lucifer growl into his ear.

‘Corporate!’ Lucifer bellowed, the spheres of light and fire dropping down to corporate one by one. Hasdiel looked around, vaguely noting that Lucifer’s hands were clutching his shoulders from behind. The angels on his side were beginning to look different, as if they’d been jumbled up and rearranged while in their true form. The fire around them burned a more crimson red, as opposed to a lighter vermillion; the light emanating from them that should be an ethereal glow was now a curling, grey smoke that lashed out at the loyal angels of the other side.

Right next to him was Raziel. Something pounded in his ears, something so loud that he couldn’t hear Lucifer’s cries and orders. He and Raziel shared a final look, the final time that they’d see each other as angels, and nodded.

‘Your eyes are black,’ Raziel said in the lull. A wall of angels faced another wall of angels, almost toe-to-toe; some sizing each other up, others, like Kokabiel, were sizing themselves up to spur themselves into action, desperately trying to convince themselves that this was what they really wanted.

‘I know.’

Then Lucifer shouted ‘forward!’, and everything Hasdiel had ever really known got lost in the fray.

*

Between the final cry to battle and an archangel with violet eyes and an oddly beautiful face smiting him on his shoulders (similar to being knighted but very aggressively, and very painfully, with consecrated steel), Hastur remembered little of the battle. He’d forgotten his own name, he just knew that he was now known as Hastur, and momentarily where he had fallen from – oh, yes: he was now falling hundreds of lightyears per second down and down and down, bodies with streams of red flying from them whooshing past him.

Aside from the incredible pressure put on the body when it fell that fast, crushed by compressing air, the heat that licked at Hastur’s body that grew more intense the longer he fell was excruciating. The bottoms of his clothes that he’d died in – the coat, the trousers, the tie – eventually glowed with Hellfire, consuming the fabric and subsequently engulfing Hastur’s entire corporation, which would eventually leave his skin not burnt, but permanently ashen.

This was God’s punishment. 10 million rebellious angels granted free reign over the Kingdom of the Damned: but they still had to make it there as angels.

But were they angels? Their suffering would’ve been over by now, being entrapped in Hellfire. No, of course they weren’t; but they weren’t demons, either. Hastur almost laughed. In the caesura between Heaven and Hell, this undefined area of freefall, the traitors were thrown into a purgatory of identity – enough divinity left to make it hurt, but not quite enough to have it destroy them and get it over with.

The suffering will end soon, Hastur assured himself, letting his limbs hang loose as he accepted the pain and the speed and the ‘blood’ still spilling from his shoulders that was turning darker and darker the further he fell. His vision grew darker, too. Finally, as Hastur neared the floor of Hell, the areas of his face where he instinctively knew his gold speckles had been began to sting and pulsate as something burst through the skin. These would be his warts, scaley and a putrid green.

As the agony reached its peak, his body slammed into a floor of smoking coals. Strewn around him were the rest of the Fallen, mostly unconscious, or otherwise unmoving. It felt as if the bones in his body had shattered to pieces, and his flesh panged with the memory of the fire.

He sat up. A few others sat up. Ash and debris cloyed to everyone’s faces; warts and scales and animal parts burst through the skin; but, just like in Heaven, everyone’s eyes were still the same.

At least, that’s how it seemed, until a snake slithered over and wound its way up Hastur’s leg, startling him.

‘Ha _ssss_ tur.’

The voice was familiar. He’d known him in Heaven.

A man manifested, still laying atop Hastur’s lap. A flurry of limbs and long, curling red hair. Koka – Hastur had the name on the tip of his tongue, but all that came out was: _‘Crawly._ ’

‘Apparently so,’ the demon snickered, pushing himself onto his own piece of the scorching floor. Crawly used to have chartreuse eyes, shaped and proportioned just like every other angels’. Now they were the eyes of a reptile, yellow with a gold shimmer lining the black edges, cut through with a slit of a pupil.

‘Did we lose?’ Hastur asked.

‘Well, this hardly looks like the winner’s prize, so I’d say so.’

The two Fallen sat in silence, Crawly on his haunches and dusting himself off. The demon had no visible warts, only a few scales peppered around the outline of his face and extending down his throat. Hastur felt around his face – he knew where the warts would be, he’d felt them come through, but in place of his soft, white hair sat something cold and wet. He felt it breathing shallowly against his hands. Hastur thrust his hands back to his lap, straining his eyes upwards to try and see what was making a home on him.

‘It’s a toad, I believe,’ Crawly offered.

Hastur had no response to that. He took one more surveillance of the area, making sure that he wasn’t the only demon with an animal stuck to their skull. Many only possessed greasy, bedraggled hair, but he saw a few snakes coiled up people’s necks, some more toads, flies, and even fish that thrashed grotesquely against some of their heads.

‘Fallen!’ A voice commanded, silencing any idle chatter still occurring. Lucifer hovered above them again, just as he had during… whatever just happened. Two more demons rose either side of him – Hastur knew intrinsically that they were the demons Beelzebub and Leviathan, despite never knowing those names before. ‘Welcome to your new Kingdom!’

A raucous cheer – more of an inharmonious moaning – burst through the vast, barren landscape.

‘You fought, and you fought well. We lost, as you can see, but we won our freedom.’ Nobody cheered this time, for each demon felt something within them that indicated the need to keep their reticence.

‘Before I take my final form and abandon this pathetic body, I have an announcement.’

The fire that blazed around the edges of Hell popped and filled the silence. Occasionally, a minor volcanic eruption would occur, sending the demons in its vicinity flying into the air and casting them back down in the far corners of the land.

‘I have begotten a son. He is my answer to God the Son. I shall cast him up to Earth someday, and test that grotesque, incompetent, deficient race to destruction. You will fight again, and you will win more than just your freedom from Heaven: you will win your freedom from humanity.’

Lucifer finished speaking. In an instant his skin glowed a cardinal red and his body inflated to that of a beast, growing a hundred times’ the size of the other demons. Beelzebub looked the size of her fly in comparison to their Ruler. He spawned two black horns that ripped open the temples of his head, and a pair of tattered bats’ wings expanded from his back where his virginal white wings once sat. After the spectacle, he crashed through the coals, and was gone.

The demons were stunned. Crawly paled next to Hastur, who in turn felt blindly invigorated following the display. If Lucifer was gaining that much power, then how much would he, his chariot and protector, gain?

Hastur sat forward, body rigid with eagerness. When would they delegate the positions? Would Hastur lead alongside Lucifer?

‘Lis _zz_ en,’ a voice droned from the same position in the sky – Beelzebub. ‘I will now give you your rankings. As _zz_ you understand, you all had certain positions in that other s _zz_ hithole. It will mirror that as best as _zz_ we could be bothered to do.’

Beelzebub read off the list of Great Kings; then Kings; then Great Princes (themselves included); then Princes.

Hastur grew impatient, though he tried to keep his council. Crawly seemed relieved for his own lack of status so far.

The Great Marquises; the Marquises.

‘Great Dukes Berith, Astaroth, Verrine, Gressil, Soneillon…’

Hastur deflated. They’d all been Thrones, the same as him. His ears begun to ring and even Crawley flashed him a sympathetic glance with his glowing eyes.

‘Finally, the last of the Highest Order, Dukes Hastur, Ligur, Carreau, and Carnivale.’ 

Hastur was… a Duke. Still technically part of the Highest Order, though right on the tail end of it. What bothered him most was that Powers, Middle Order angels, had crept their way into his ranking. He’d been their superior at some point, he could remember that much…

The list continued to encompass Earls, Presidents, Knights, and Marshals, prefixed by ‘Great’ or otherwise. Why wasn’t Hastur great? Had he not done everything Lucifer had asked of him? Was he blamed for the loss? Surely not – there were 10 million other demons to carry the blame of that.

Crawly managed to get off without any title at all, as they hadn’t accounted for the Lowest Order. He was just a regular demon, committed to eternity in Disgrace. He seemed almost relieved to have been overlooked, which filled Hastur with an effervescing sort of resentment.

‘You look happy,’ he spat, still sat on the floor with the serpent as the other demons rose up and set to work building Hell.

‘Y’know, don’t tell anyone or anything, but I’m sort of ambivalent about this whole thing. King, Duke, Great President, I don’t care. I’m just glad that I don’t have any sort of responsibility…’ (a remark that would later become a falsehood, as Satan tasked Crawly with possibly the most important task of all, tempting humanity into rebellion; this in turn also irked Hastur, who felt that the job should’ve gone to, oh, he doesn’t know, a Duke, perhaps?).

‘What? You’re mad! Don’t you want power? Something for your efforts?

Crawly didn’t feel the need to dignify Hastur’s incredulous demand with a response, only shrugging in his usual irritating irreverence and _swaggering_ away, of all things, schmoozing other demons and getting underfoot as they erected the walls of Hell from the smouldering coals.

Hastur watched his new home grow around him, sat idly on the ground until he was forcibly evicted when somebody needed the spare coal. He wandered around, already feeling more lost and confused than he had in those final weeks in Heaven. He suppressed any memory of the place that came before, and looked down at the ground a final time before setting to help his fellow demons.

Was I not good enough? He projected the thought towards the floor, casting it as far down as he could, but it must’ve fallen upon deaf ears, or nobody’s ears at all. Hastur was doomed to live an eternity devoid of closure. The ponderance dropped from his mind and ricocheted through the walls of Hell, journeying through the Circles that were being constructed to accommodate all different kinds of sinners. Hastur would never know if it had reached the bottom.

‘Hey, Hastur!’

It was Ligur, eyes still looping through variegated colours, this time mirrored by a chameleon gripping tightly to his hair. ‘I like the toad,’ Ligur complimented, pointing at his own reptile.

Hastur tried a smile, and it seemed to satisfy his fellow Duke.

‘We’re Dukes, huh?’

A pang went through Hastur’s chest. He bit his lips to stop the howl that was beginning to force its way from the depths of his core, instead nodding as sinisterly as he could muster – he had to get used to the whole ‘evil’ thing, after all.

‘Come on. Let’s go bother some of the Earls into doing our dirty work. I’ve got some seriously vile ideas for The River Styx.’

Hastur gave an empty cheer, pretending to know what The River Styx was, and readied himself to impose his authority on somebody, anybody. Bossing an Earl about was better than nothing, he reasoned, and picked up a demon with two stylised spikes of hair and spiders’ legs of eyelashes to dissolve in the river along the way – for good measure.


	9. You Make Me Live

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> was this my favourite to write? possibly. keywords: spritz.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ Ligur announced as he met Hastur at his desk. ‘About Crowley. Something’s not right.’

Hastur had spent the penultimate day before Armageddon in Hell, trying to get himself back into the spirt of things, if only to give a convincing façade of patriotism to any demon with a strong fanaticism for Armageddon that should see him before he went to Megiddo.

At the mention of Crowley’s name, and the idea of Ligur thinking too hard about anything, Hastur dropped the metal bucket he’d been thanklessly holding up to catch the green sludge dripping from the pipe overhanging his desk.

‘Oh, look at this! I’m meant to be getting ready to go to Megiddo to meet the boy. I should be leaving now,’ Hastur embellished, ensuring that Ligur was reminded of his quote-unquote loyalty to the cause. ‘Instead I’m standing here with a bucket, waiting for maintenance to come and fix another bloody pipe.’

Ligur was not diverted by Hastur’s kvetching as intended, and only proceeded to say everything that Hastur had hoped he wouldn’t say.

‘Crowley… I’m not sure what he’s done, but it’s nothing good.’

Hastur let out a sigh of relief. ‘Oh, well that’s alright then. He’s not meant to do good.’

Ligur gave him a long-suffering glare. ‘Figure of speech.’

Oh, shit, Hastur thought, not those bloody things. He’d had just about enough of them from Laoise - oh, Satan, what was that feeling? At the utterance of her name through one of the wrinkles in his brain, a sort of crushing melancholy enveloped him, sort of akin to what people felt in Limbo. That doesn’t make sense, Hastur thought, and wondered instead if he had yet _another_ human feeling to try and unearth.

‘Nothing bad, then,’ Ligur tried.

Hastur, again, breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe this would all be okay after all. ‘Nothing bad? So… he’s not in trouble?’

Ligur’s chameleon flashed orange to green with frustration. ‘He’s definitely in trouble. Or he will be.’

Hastur’s stomach, or the general area, sunk. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. This could really throw a wrench in the works if, you know, he had to murder the one with the plan. ‘We’re not going in, are we?’ Hastur asked, hardly wanting to say the words for fear of speaking it into existence. That sort of thing had happened before, like when he got drunk in about 1346 and joked about a plague being the most efficient way to wipe out the human race.

‘Not yet. We need proof. But once we’ve got it, he’s toast.’

Hastur nodded, trying to fathom a way out of this. ‘And that’s gonna hurt,’ he ventured by way of distraction.

‘What, being toasted?’ Ligur questioned, chameleon a confused blue. Eventually he gave a raspy laugh. ‘Oh, yeah.’

‘Right, toast.’ Hastur raised the bucket at Ligur, in ‘toast’, he supposed. ‘Back to Armageddon, then,’ Hastur said with poorly effected enthusiasm. 

That conversation went just about as smoothly as any conversation went between them, yet Hastur wished he’d managed to water down Ligur’s suspicions just a little bit more. How the hell was he supposed to thwart Ligur, without actually doing any overt thwarting?

*

The Duke surveyed the desert expanding around him. As his eyes cast over the rolling hills, the jutting hipbones of Israel extending towards the sky as the country lay reclined, he produced a finger of fire, too nervous to will a whole hand, and lit a newly rolled cigarette. He took a few puffs before turning expectantly to the three disposables before him.

‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will ride over the plain to us, and then our forces…I’m calling us ‘Darkforce One’… rise up…through the Earth…opposition descend from above.’

‘This is Armageddon? This is where the world will end?’ He asked, a little underwhelmed, cigarette limply poised in his hand. He hadn’t been paying attention to the lowly demon’s droning. Maybe Crowley’s plan was already in play, and he’d muted any sort of augustness that the Bureaucrats of Hell had set up beforehand.

‘Well, that’s the Greek name for it. Technically, the Fields of Megiddo. Archaeological excavations that way,’ the demon extended a spindly arm to Hastur’s left. ‘Avocado fields that way.’

Hastur spoke around the cigarette. ‘They grow avocadoes here?’

He wasn’t sure why he cared. Maybe it was just another diversion, an indirect way of buying Crowley more time to enact this plan of his. Where was the bastard, anyway?

The demon chuckled. ‘Yeah. We have a joke, actually. We say,’ he turned to the side, a touch dramatically, and lowered his voice to a grave intone. ‘It’s gonna be one _big_ avocado.’

He flashed his teeth, lovely and straight, and laughed. Bugger this, Hastur thought, and dropped the cigarette after one premature final puff, blowing an obnoxious veil of smoke to the air that may or may not be there in less than half an hour.

Maybe it was the general irritation he’d always felt for these demons, or the crushing, headache-inducing stress that was emanating from each pore of his skin, not helped by the fact that he hadn’t immediately understood the inane joke. Hastur wasn’t sure why he began choking the demon until he dissolved into flames and precipitated back to the dirt as worthless ash, but he did it, anyway. It felt good. They were like little stress balls, there to squeeze and vent your frustrations – single use, of course.

Where the Hell is Crowley? Hastur wondered yet again, reminded sourly of the night that he and Ligur had handed over the Antichrist. How Hastur wished that had never happened – but there was no turning back time now, only the increasingly difficult pursuit of not ending it.

The second demon stepped forward and said his drivel, which again ended in a blaze of light as Hastur opted for a swifter death, just to reap immediate satisfaction. What was a ‘photo-op’? A ‘selfie’? If he still cared when this was all over, he’d have to ask Laoise.

There it was again – the grip of melancholy. Despondency. Maybe it was just the stress of thinking about her, while he stood here, fending off the end of the world with a twig. She was what was at stake, for him at any rate.

He let the third and final demon have his say, recapping the events of Armageddon, but he wasn’t listening. He’d finally gotten the joke! Maybe that’s what the odd feeling was – amusement. Yes, it must be, because the last time it had hit him, he was understanding figures of speech with Ligur.

Hastur stifled a laugh. ‘It’ll be one… big… avocado?’

He scoffed and scoffed, until the hysterical laughter couldn’t be repressed, sending the demon shuffling backwards and near tripping over the smoking clothes of his two predecessors. Hastur was undecided as to whether he should let him join them. Oh, what the Hell – in for a penny, in for a pound, he’d once heard someone say. He didn’t bother with the theatrics of fire or blinding light. With a gesture of his hand, the other being used to produce another cigarette, the demon vanished into a puddle of his own clothes, pooling amongst the others’.

The sun hung lower over Megiddo, beginning to scrape the mountain tops. Hastur was alone, save for the Israeli guide who seemed to be doing his best to not go anywhere near Hastur.

He was chain-smoking now, not that he’d known it in such colloquial terms, but he cut through tobacco like he cut through disposable demons. Megiddo seemed to be going according to plan, which is not something Hastur had ever expected he’d be so agitated about. To make matters worse, numerous black cars made their way out of the horizon, small, patriotic American flags flapping on the bonnets. Hastur threw his tenth cigarette down, having curated quite the impressive pile, and straightened himself out, still wary of the fact that he was to meet his Master’s son.

He inspected each of the cars as they parked in an eerily-neat row. No Bentley in sight. Come on, Flash Bastard…

A portly man with a pale, clean-shaven face got out of the car, rudely walking ahead of his wife, who looked to be in far better shape and dress sense than he was. Staggering moodily behind them, lingering by the van that was furthest away from his parents, was the boy. Hastur’s whole body froze, no longer listening to the idle yet aggressive chatter of the ambassador and his wife, nor most of the introductory statements given by the guide. He caught the tail end, snapped back to his unfortunate reality as the bearded man gestured towards him.

‘Ah, I’m Hastur,’ the demon fumbled for words, put off by the unreadable expressions on the fallacious parents of the Antichrist. Something occurred to him: memories of Crowley popping up behind him in Hell since about 1991, and saying a rather obnoxious bastardisation of the Duke’s name. ‘…La Vista. I’m an archaeologist.’

There, that should do it.

The sun beating down on Megiddo was unbearable but he refused to remove the scarf and trench coat. Why couldn’t all heat be like Hell’s - oppressive, and consisting entirely in a dark, humid room?

The words of the Israeli guide flowed off of his ears as he scrutinized the boy. He began shaking, only very subtly, stepping away from the ambassador to leer down into Warlock’s face.

‘You must be Warlock,’ Hastur dragged out, preoccupied with considering how in the nine levels of _Hell_ Crowley was going to quash literal Armageddon in the next thirty minutes or so when it had been 6000 years in the making. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’

Come on, you snake. Where are you?

The child looked at him incredulously through curtains of dark hair. His eyes were the same muted blue that his had been before the fall, Hastur recognised, and suddenly wished to be as far away from the boy as possible, in as little time as possible.

‘You smell like poo.’

‘Ha, ha! Funny boy, always love a good joke, me,’ Hastur assured the boy’s concerned ‘parents’, struggling to handle the ignorance of the child.

He looked around, eyebrows furrowed deeply into his eyes, the boy’s eyes still baring into his grey, wart-ridden flesh. ‘Where’s… the dog… _why_ doesn’t the boy have a _dog_?’ Hastur demanded, head whipping around from the rolling mountains of Israel behind him to the modern cars parked in uneven lines before him.

Thaddeus spluttered and his wife looked ready to intervene, though still with the disinterested air of a politician that Hastur had grown so accustomed to over years of tempting and corrupting. A part of him, that increasingly huge part of himself devoted to Laoise, regretted all of it. He regretted the Fall, the submission and pandering to the Dark Council. He understood Crowley - as unfortunate as that felt.

‘Do - do you hear voices?’ Hastur implored of the boy.

‘The voices?’ Warlock answered, promisingly.

‘Yes! What are they telling you?’

Hastur leered down further, imposing, remembering who he was: Hastur, Duke of Hell. King in Yellow. The Unspeakable One. He let his heart harden as the boy’s eyes glistened with a twinge of recognition.

‘The voices… in my head… _all tell me -_ ‘

‘Yes?’

Warlock took a deep breath, hair quivering as he nodded. ‘- you smell like poo.’

Hastur didn’t know what did it. That certainly _wasn’t_ the Antichrist. The Traitor is nowhere to be found.

He better pray to _Satan_ that he’s found the right boy, Hastur thought, already mentally preparing to obliterate Crowley, otherwise he’s _fucked_ straight to oblivion.

The Duke felt nothing but a pure, buzzing, encompassing strain. His head swirled and his eyes felt sharp, like an insect atrophying the tissue of the purely black irises. Habitually, he brought a finger to his sharp and yellowed teeth and _bit_. He clamped down and groaned, cursing _Crowley, Crowley_ , over and over, until he again drew a thick, black blood that dripped down his chin and settled in the fabric of his fingerless gloves. He wished, if just for his image as a demon, that it didn’t hurt one bit - but the entire point of the act was that it hurt. It hurt like all Heaven, like the Holy Water he’d seen decimate his fellow Fallen in the first War. That was the point, of course. To manifest everything painful and disquieting, everything that aggrieved him, into something physical and recognisable. Something people could see.

And see they did. Warlock – _NOT_ the Antichrist - rolled his eyes, turning his back on the Duke and pulling faces with his _NOT-_ the-Antichrist face in the car window. The Dowlings raised their eyebrows, and the guide only shook his head resignedly, as if he’d seen it all before.

After sufficiently chewing through calloused skin and sinewy finger muscles, the digit an unrecognisably bloody affair, he straightened up and smiled at the family, as well as the Secret Service Agents who had their hands poised half-heartedly on their long-barrelled guns. Blood stained each tooth and dripped down the corners of his mouth, the two streams meeting at a peak at the bottom of his chin.

‘Well, I’ll be seeing you all,’ Hastur said, though at this point, he absolutely wouldn’t, and none of them would likely see anyone again. He didn’t care to tell them that, though there would be little harm in doing so. The consequences would only reverberate for about 30 minutes more – and Hastur knew _exactly_ what he was going to do with that time.

He disappeared into a rift, the sight hardly fazing the people he left behind in Megiddo. Warlock thought that the stunt was quite the redemption arc, much better than that stupid magician he’d seen on Wednesday.

‘Mom, dad, why didn’t you guys get _him_ for my party? That was actual magic!’

Thaddeus and Harriet shared a long-wearied glance, both individually disturbed that they were considering it for next years’ party.

*

Initially, the plan for the remaining half an hour of time and space itself was to go and rip Crowley’s throat out with the aid of Ligur – but then Hastur remembered that a good throat-ripping or otherwise was a one-demon job, and he had more important business to attend to.

A little under half an hour to spare, and he was outside her apartment block; however, also within a corral of bright-yellow tape with black, block-capital lettering on it that read CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS.

‘Sir, you cannot be in here right now.’

A portentous police officer that looked rather uncomfortable in his tight-fitting uniform waddled closer to Hastur, writing something on an impossibly small notepad. 

‘You wish,’ Hastur said, setting the paper alight against the man’s flesh with a casual gesture before snapping his fingers with all the self-importance of demonic nobility to grant him access to the building. He hoped that Laoise was okay - they’d at least have something to ‘gossip’ about, as Crowley had called it once.

The tape extended up the bannisters and blocked the elevators, not that Hastur was the biggest elevator-user out there, anyway. At every corner another official told him what not to do, and at every corner an official slumped to the floor with a broken neck. He reached her floor, where the yellow ribbon stopped extending up the bannister. Oh, no. It had happened on _her_ floor.

Urgency gripped Hastur. Fancy this happening at the same time as the end of the world. The last thing you need is to be a sitting duck, anticipating the end, _and_ handling a murder, Hastur thought, with what he recognised as rather human-like sympathy.

Something else gripped Hastur. The melancholy grew stronger, and stronger, crushing his rips and tying itself to his ankles, stopping him from running to her door when he tried to. This was not amusement, he realised with dread, a conversely familiar sensation to a demon.

Made all the worse by the fact that the tape did not just stop at her floor – it stopped at her door. Masses and masses of yellow criss-crossed her doorframe, her door opened wide to allow all the forensic team in, all the officers, and all the very official-looking people in drab suits.

Oh. Oh no.

Hastur finally understood. Not that he wanted to, of course, but you can’t hide from blatant facts.

He snapped about twelve more necks, surprising himself at the sheer number of people that felt the need to creep around her apartment and voyeur whatever there was to voyeur. He stepped over bodies, a sort of trail leading him to the thing he never wanted to see.

Not today, not ever.

The apartment reeked with the singe of Hellfire.

He disappeared all of the excess collateral, and made the door shut and lock. This was his moment. Their moment. A final try at privacy.

Her body was broken – her neck, for certain, and her spine where she lay folded over the bottom step of the short stairwell. He scooped her up, holding her together, holding her against him, as if it would make a difference. Bruises around her neck were what gave the strongest indication of Hellfire – the smell would be repugnant in its potency, had he not been a demon.

He didn’t know how long he held her for, but certainly less than half an hour, for the world did not end around him – not any more than it already had.

Hastur knew very well what had happened, and though he didn’t know the full extent, that didn’t matter. One of his own knew about her, and subsequently of his betrayal. He was too busy being exposed to lost-emotion after lost-emotion, hitting him each at a time like all of Heaven’s sanctified weaponry at once, to spare much thought to the ramifications of this inconvenient development.

In and amongst all of the auras he was beginning to understand – grief, loneliness, attachment, dependency – he gained better context to the feeling around Laoise’s name. Now he knew she was gone, it was all very clear. At least whichever demon had done this had the courtesy to allow her spirit to rest in its right place.

Hastur dropped the body, reviving the police and officials after many moments of deliberation, and descending back to Hell – no, not Hell’s office. Real, true, open-to-the-public Hell.

Hastur hadn’t been down to the pits of Hell in many a century. It was decidedly beneath him – they had thousands upon thousands of Marshals and Knights to be doing all the torturing and provoking down there.

It was also a massive risk, letting himself into Hell, considering Head Office most certainly had him on their hitlist. Limbo was fairly neutral ground, Hastur tried to reassure himself, grabbing at straws to salvage this situation. Nobody was really tortured there. Armageddon would be going ahead, but at least his Laoise had left early to avoid the rush.

*

Never in her life did Laoise think she’d be playing a primitive version of poker with the majority of the Platonic Academy - in actual Hell, no less.

She missed her friends, her family, and she grieved not only for the life she’d been robbed of, but for however they felt when they heard the news. And Hastur. As selfish as she felt, she worried most for Hastur. Beelzebub had made it explicitly clear what she wanted the outcome of her killing to be, and she fretted that Hastur would just revert to his blindly-loyal, demonic ways.

Only she and Dionysus remained in the round. Dionysus had hijacked the game, evoking groans from his fellow Grecians, but was allowed a hand anyway.

‘Flush.’ He laid his hand out.

‘Four of a kind,’ she gritted, accepting her loss. Dionysus cackled and swept the twigs and bush leaves the group had foraged as betting stakes. She reclined on the grass, staring at the permanently overcast sky (‘It reminds you that you can never reach Upstairs,’ Socrates had said by way of explanation).

‘I can’t believe I was actually killed by a demon.’

‘Believe it,’ Plato said, gathering up the makeshift cards. ‘Truthfully, I thought this was all a load of rubbish, and then I ended up here.’

‘I thought it was a load of rubbish until I ended up in love – sleeping with a demon,’ she corrected herself, rubbing her hands over her face.

Plato and Socrates shared a soft glance. She just about caught it from where she lay. It made her grieve harder for Hastur – at least the two of them got each other for the rest of eternity. Whether Hell won or lost, she wasn’t convinced Hastur would spare her a second thought in and amongst the execution of the Great Plan.

The atmosphere around them darkened, as it sometimes did, but this time with a heavier sense of foreboding. She opened her eyes again and looked towards the ceiling of Hell, where a familiar ebony cloud was gaining momentum as it fell towards the ground.

She stood pleasantly corrected.

Out of the curls of smoke stepped a familiar, lean, menacing demon, though without the white hair, and with clothing distinctly more charred and bedraggled.

And what looked like a – toad?

‘I feel like this is for you,’ Plato whispered, nudging her shoulder to force her up onto her feet.

Hastur looked positively drained. Aside from the fact that she’d been killed, which really had little to do with whether or not Crowley’s plan went forward, she could only assume that just about everything had gone wrong.

‘Hastur?’ She said cautiously, suddenly aware that this could be some Hellish torture device.

He nodded, craning himself around her shoulder to gesture rudely towards the gathered group of virtuous non-believers before returning his full attention to her.

‘Made new friends?’

She looked back towards where they’d once sat against the bush, most of them now scattered around the fields. ‘Yeah, I suppose so. Hey, Hastur,’ she began, turning back to him with her hands on his chest. ‘What’s… what happened?’

He sighed with the strength of Earthly wind and sat himself down, pulling her down with him.

‘Long version or the short version?’

‘How long till the end of the world?’

‘About 25 minutes.’

If she hadn’t sat down, her legs would’ve given way. ‘Short,’ she gagged out.

‘Someone killed you and they’re probably coming for me. Ligur’s trying to get hold of me to go and sort out Crowley, because he’s just gone and misplaced the fucking Antichrist and hadn’t the spoons to tell Head Office.’

She pressed her forehead into the tips of her fingers. ‘Right. Makes sense. So, Armageddon, yay or nay?’

‘What?’

‘Is it happening or not?’

‘Oh. Most definitely it is happening. I’ll have a word with him when I go to him with Ligur.’

Hastur choked on the start of a word but couldn’t finish it. She peered up at him between her fingers and raised an eyebrow.

‘I’m so sorry.’

Laoise figured there was no use doing anything other than brushing off the apology. Really, if anyone was going to apologise, it should be Beelzebub.

‘Don’t mention it. It’s not so bad here. At least my nose isn’t getting lopped off, or I’m not beating somebody in the middle of a pool of blood.’

Hastur smiled in recognition, the toad sticking its tongue out happily. ‘You obviously lived a good life. Didn’t believe in God, though.’

‘See, I thought, you know, sleeping with a demon would clear up that issue.’

Hastur looked puzzled. ‘If anything, I thought that’d cast you right down to Lust.’

There was a lull. She wanted to know so many things, but it might do her better to go through eternity not knowing the answers.

‘I can’t believe I’m dead.’

‘Nor can I. Well, I know my lot, so it’s not terribly shocking that one of them killed you. I just want to know how they found out.’

As did Laoise, but that wouldn’t change anything.

‘I think you better use those 25 minutes wisely. Hastur, Crowley must still have a plan. He must’ve known that it was the wrong boy and planned around that.’

Hastur bit his lips in thought. ‘I think sitting here is a wise use of time, but I suppose.’

Will I see you again? was the question on the tip of Laoise’s tongue, as it often was when it came time for Hastur to leave her, but it seemed a more pressing question to ask this time, yet infinitely less desirable to know the answer. She kept shtum.

The pair stood up and embraced.

‘I’ll see what I can do. If anything, I can really put Crowley through it for 6000 years of cockups.’

She winced. ‘Don’t hurt him too bad. I’m sure he meant well.’

Hastur shook his head. ‘It’s really no wonder you’re only in the first circle. It really does look awful for me.’

He kissed her forehead, and was gone.

*

Crowley watched the television with nervous fascination. Each channel reported on the sign of the times, each mythical beast and conspiracy theory that the Antichrist willed into existence. He checked his watch. 20 minutes. He had no plan. Aziraphale had no word on the Antichrist’s whereabouts. It was all lost, and there was, quite literally, Hell to pay.

And here it was.

_CROWLEY._

‘…Yes,’ he admitted to the effigy of Hastur, suddenly in the place of one of those boring newscasters you see once in a blue moon on the BBC.

_WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?_

‘How d’you mean?’ He asked, being deliberately obtuse.

_YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHAT I MEAN. THE BOY CALLED WARLOCK. WE HAVE BROUGHT HIM TO THE FIELDS OF MEGIDDO. THE DOG IS NOT WITH HIM. HE KNOWS NOTHING OF ARMAGEDDON._

‘Ah,’ said Crowley.

_IS THAT ALL YOU CAN SAY, CROWLEY? THE HORSEMEN ARE RIDING, BUT WHERE ARE THEY RIDING TO? SOMETHING HAS GONE WRONG. WE HAVE 20 MINUTES. I TRUST YOU HAVE A REASONABLE EXPLANATION FOR THIS._

‘Oh, yes,’ agreed Crowley. ‘I know exactly what I’m doing. It’s all part of my plan… it’s…’

Oh, what the Hell, thought Crowley.

‘It’s ineffable.’

_YOUR PLAN IS INEFFABLE? YOU BETTER MAKE IT EFFABLE, CROWLEY, OR THERE’LL BE MY PERSONAL HELL TO PAY. AS WELL AS GENERAL HELL. FOR MISPLACING THE BLOOY ANTICHRIST. YOU HAD ONE JOB._

‘Gotcha.’

_WE’RE COMING NOW, CROWLEY._

‘We? Who’s we?’

_DUKE LIGUR WILL BE WITH ME. YOU WILL BE SPARED HIS WRATH IF YOU CAN TELL ME WHAT THIS GREAT PLAN IS. CIAO_.

Crowley wished he’d never used ‘ciao’ 11 years ago in that graveyard – he also wished he’d maybe been a bit more… diligent, 11 years ago. For different reasons, naturally.

He looked out of the window to see a vaguely car-shaped object rolling up the street, slowing to a crawl as the Dukes checked the house numbers. The wheels did not turn. He had to smile at their loose approximation of a car, and the fact that he had quite the ineffable plan for whichever of the two should walk through his door first.

Crowley, with all the protective gear of a nuclear power plant worker, decanted the long-kept Holy Water into the red bucket. Despite its previous home being a 330-millilitre thermos, the stream seemed unnervingly never-ending. It near filled the bucket. He thought it best not to speculate as he propped it neatly on the ajar door, rushing back to his chair as the Dukes’ voices carried closer to his room.

‘We only want a word with you,’ Ligur crooned.

Crowley tried to appear relaxed, but could not coax his spine from its rigid, rod-like stance. He gripped the arms of the chair.

‘In here, people,’ he conceded. Following his words, the squatter of the two pushed through the door first, sending the bucket plummeting right onto his head without wasting a splash of Holy Water.

The scene was quite spectacular. The bucket compacted to create a mould of Ligur’s face, immortalising his look of horror as the water seemingly melted the demon’s face. He tousled with the bucket and sank to his knees but to no avail, as his body and flesh disintegrated down into an agitated vapor.

Hastur let out a scream of pure horror.

‘Hi,’ Crowley greeted.

Hastur stepped around the body with as wide a berth as possible, one hand covering his mouth as the other pointed futilely at the scarce remains of Ligur.

‘T-t-that’s, that’s Holy Water!’

‘Yep.’

‘I can’t believe even a demon would – would – would – _Holy Water!_ ’

The screaming subsided but Hastur was nowhere close to calm. Crowley eyed up the plant mister set on the desk in front of him, prepared to use it, but also prepared to level with Hastur.

‘Look, Duke Hastur, I’m going to need you to calm down.’

‘How am I meant to calm down? Laoise is dead, you’ve cocked up Armageddon, to absolutely _no_ body’s surprise…’

‘Oh, cheers.’

Laoise was dead? Oh, _shit_. Crowley set his arm a little closer to the spray bottle, lest Hastur decide that the murder was _his_ problem. Though, based on how things were going, Crowley thought, in a round-about way it probably was.

Something occurred to Crowley, something that was only relevant if they could still stop the end of the world; though that was looking impossible.

‘Hastur… when did she die?’

‘Why do you care? Thursday night, I think. I wish I knew who’d done it.’

Crowley rubbed his jaw. He relinquished ready-access to the ‘Holy Water’, forgoing any leverage, and moved towards Hastur.

‘Hastur, if we were to, say, stop Armageddon in the next 15 minutes, then plausibly…’

And then the phone rang.

The two demons looked at it, both fully expecting a phone call from Hell for two different reasons. And then they looked at each other. And then Crowley picked up.

‘I know where the Antichrist is!’

Hastur stepped closer to Crowley, mouthing questions at him as Crowley waved him off. Oh, Angel, he praised, I knew you’d pull through.

‘You do, now, do you?’

‘Yes, I – oh, apologies, somebody’s just come into the shop – we’re very much closed, sir…’

Aziraphale hung up. Crowley still held the receiver to his ear, not ready to relinquish the connection to Aziraphale’s voice telling him the _exact_ information he needed to hear to save his life.

‘Well? Who was it?’

To tell Hastur, or not to tell Hastur – he was reminded of that gloomy one of Shakespeare’s. He might’ve paid more attention to that one, had he known this would be his dilemma.

‘Aziraphale knows where the boy – the real one – is.’

Hastur’s face lit up, painfully delighted. ‘Oh! I never thought I’d be thankful for wankwings.’ Crowley winced at the nickname. ‘So? Where is he? Who is he?’

‘Aziraphale hung up on me.’

‘Yes, I can see that. Gone to find the boy, I imagine, and enact this plan. Really, we should get a move on, too. Where’re we going?’

‘He hung up before he could say,’ Crowley rushed out, turning his back on Hastur once more and preparing to reach for his leverage.

‘He _what_?’

Hand around the neck of the spray bottle. ‘Oh, sweet Satan, Hastur, he didn’t _tell_ me. But he still knows… come on. We’re going for a ride.’

‘Now, hold on,’ Hastur snapped, not budging from where he hovered by the desk, even as Crowley bounded to the door. ‘Not in any vehicle of yours.’

Crowley threw his head back and groaned. ‘Duke Hastur, really? You’re going to be petulant about that now?’

He folded his arms across his chest and for the first time, Crowley realised that he had his wig pulled on over his toad. Must’ve been a rough one in Megiddo. Crowley bit back laughter.

‘Hastur,’ he drawled, kicking Ligur’s clothes out of the way as he stood on them. ‘Who’s to say I haven’t any more Holy Water? Mm?’ He lifted his arm, poising it within the other one like a gun.

Hastur dropped his arms. ‘You wouldn’t. You need me.’

‘Oh, do I? Then prove it. Get in the car, or I spritz you to death.’

‘You don’t frighten me,’ Hastur grumbled, pushing past Crowley and stomping moodily down the hallway.

‘Do you feel _lucky_?’ Crowley teased, skipping after Hastur down the hall, reminded of a speech from a Clint Eastwood movie he’d seen around the time Aziraphale had given him the Holy Water, that he _absolutely hadn’t memorised_ , should he ever be in this particular position.

Crowley bombed it down the surprisingly easy-to-navigate streets of inner-city London (which was a little bit suspect, Hastur thought) laughing sort of manically to himself while unaware of Hastur in the passenger seat, who’s hands were scrambling around the car to find anything suitable to hold onto. There was nothing stable, other than the thin handle sat above the window that Crowley had directed him towards, only for it to prove itself to be placed there as more of a novelty decoration. Hastur could not sympathise with the squawking coming from Crowley’s dashboard, for he was not ‘having such a good time, having a ball’.

‘How far are we from the shop?’ Hastur said through gritted teeth, hands white-knuckling the edges of his seat.

‘Seconds, if this light doesn’t change,’ Crowley said. Of course, the light did not change, and traffic wardens and drivers in the vicinity alike were very, very confused, for it seemed that light had been green for the past few minutes.

‘We’re here – oh.’

It was a familiar site to Hastur. Flashing lights, people crowding around, stopped only by a weak barricade of tape. It took the pair a little longer to see the flames; the flames that were coming from the bookshop.

Crowley slammed on the breaks, violently.

‘Hastur, stay in the car.’

He ripped down the street, throwing people from his path and turning to scream something at the firemen. He gestured the doors open and shut, leaving Hastur to stare out of the window at the helpless and perplexed firemen, all looking to him for answers. He only shrugged, gladly thwarting Crowley’s command to stay in the death-trap and staggering out into the street, legless with fear.

The firemen dared not go near him, for he was doubled over on the side of the road and dry heaving, but they yelled at him all the same.

‘Sir, stay right where you are. Don’t follow your friend.’

‘Do I really look like I’m going anywhere?’

He got his second wind and bent back upright, shutting his eyes and willing everyone in the vicinity to look away from him. He opened his eyes again – it had worked, and not a misplaced broken neck in sight. He was applauding himself for restraining the intrinsic demonic tendency to ‘accidentally’ cause more harm than intended when a great force came down upon his head, sending him skidding along the pavement.

Hastur needn’t have exerted himself to look painfully up at his accoster, it was undeniably Beelzebub, but he thought an incriminating glare wouldn’t hurt.

‘Enjoyed your time in Limbo, then?’

‘What do you want?’

‘You know exactly what I want – not to mention what the res _zz_ t of the Dark Council wants _zz_ with you. You know what we do with _traitorszz_.’

‘You told the Dark Council?

Beelzebub straightened up from where they squatted over him, flicking their wrists and giving everybody free reign over the oscillation of their necks again.

‘Thank _zz_ for that, by the way, really s _zz_ aved me the trouble. It’ll be going on your frivolous curs _zz_ es _zz_ li _szz_ t, though.’

They took a final look around the area.

‘Crowley not coming back, then? The Council’s a tad more ups _zz_ et with him, if I’m hones _zz_ t.’

‘How the Heaven should I know? I thought you lot were all-seeing, anyway.’

Beelzebub buzzed in agitation before gripping Hastur harshly by his upper arm, pushing both of them down through the tarmac.


	10. Pheurton Skeurto

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi, torture in this one. proceed with caution :)

It’s easier to understand demons’ prerogatives when you understood the Seven Deadly Sins.

Right from the beginning there was a sort of business-initiative-style of organisation: departments, if you will. The seven princes each took a sin to tempt with, and their subordinates were determined based on nothing other than their (unknowingly) observed actions.

Hastur had gotten envy.

It was Beelzebub’s sin. They’d been together, right from the word ‘go’, as he’d been one of the easiest to sort. As soon as he opened his mouth to speak to Crawly during what was effectively Hell’s first briefing, it was obvious.

Ligur had gotten wrath, in Hastur’s opinion a far cooler sin (though not in as many words). Crowley picked his own: inconveniences that chip the paint of the soul, as opposed to smashing up the bonnet. Apparently, it was a car analogy.

Beelzebub and Hastur started their demonic careers together, and as it stood, it looked as if they’d end it that way, too.

The torture chamber had modernised since 3000 B.C., with all sorts of new equipment made in sturdier materials. Hastur thrashed against the metal wire that bound his hands together behind the metal chair - last time it had been twine and a splintered stool. Nobody stood in the room with him, as far as he could tell in the all-consuming darkness. He supposed that it was part of the torture, not knowing when or how it would start and at who’s hands. He felt the thin metal cutting into his wrists, something viscid and wet rolling down his curled-up hands and off the tips of his fingers; Hastur stopped struggling.

He heard a murmur come from a few feet in front of him. ‘Finally, he’s stopped. Care to do the honours?’

‘No, you do it, Lord Beelzebub. I have a unit to rile up.’

Belphegor’s growling died out along with his footsteps, a heavy steel door creaking on its hinges before slamming shut with a sonorous clang. Hastur could feel the rage coming from Beelzebub, the anger, and something else. Envy? It was certainly envy.

‘Lord _Beelzebub_ – ‘

‘Don’t you ‘Lord’ me, traitor. It was one thing to find you fucking a human, but it was a whole other betrayal to find you and Crowley braving an attempt at stopping the Great Plan.’

‘Not so great if it can be stopped.’

‘It is _zz_ written.’

He heard her sharp footsteps clicking closer to him, until he felt her hands brush the side of his head.

‘Belphegor gave me the run-down on what happened 5000 years ago. I think it was a bit boring, to be hones _zz_ t,’ Beelzebub murmured, right into Hastur’s neck, sticking a sharp nail into one of the wounds underneath his ribcage. Only then did the demon realise that he was completely naked before Beelzebub. He couldn’t give that terror much thought before his mind blanked and his vision went white with the pain, his superior twisting and turning her finger every which way in the artificial orifice, two knuckles deep now. He was certain they’d hit upon an organ soon.

‘Did it bore you, Hastur? Is that why you went looking for more?’

‘I never went _look_ ing,’ he panted, managing the everlasting pain by grinding his teeth roughly into each other. ‘I fell into it.’

‘In numerous ways, I take it. Quite the interesting quota you racked up these past few weeks.’

Hastur grunted in response, tilting his gaze towards his left thigh despite seeing nothing but black. Something sat wrong with him, hearing that Beelzebub’s thoughts have touched Laoise. He wanted her to remain inviolable from his world, and he’d failed her on that.

‘Look. At. Me.’ Beelzebub commanded, wrenching his neck as she pulled his face towards hers again – he guessed as much from the hot, sour breath panting directly onto his face. ‘Stop thinking about her. I can feel you thinking about her.’

‘What the Hell do you mean?’

Beelzebub paced backwards. He forced a yawn to stretch his jaw out. What felt like minutes of silence passed, but he had the faintest inkling that they were warping his sense of time. It wasn’t unheard of.

‘Haven’t you a war to tend to? Do you really have time to be doing this if you’re meant to be fighting, Lord?’

‘Don’t – ‘ Beelzebub began, their voice crackling into silence once more. ‘Open your wings, Hastur.’

It was a simple command. A simple command, one that any outsider wouldn’t bat an eyelid to – but it was in the way that they’d said it, in such a knowingly vile and purposeful tone. There was a wicked smile behind those words, Hastur could sense it.

‘No.’

He hadn’t heard them walking towards him that time, but there they were, right in his face, regardless.

‘Open. Your wings.’

‘What if I don’t?’

‘If you don’t? Then this – ‘

Hastur’s ears rung with agony.

He hadn’t a clue how long it had taken, or how Beelzebub had been so efficient even in all of their years of practice; as it stood, there was a hole in the left side of his chest, his skin being forced into his body and catching in between his ribcage, some torn flaps hanging back out again and with them carrying a waterfall of nerves and veins. In Beelzebub’s hand, a heart.

‘It’s still beating.’

He heard them sniff ravenously, making lewd noises of approval at the scent.

‘It smells bloody fantastic. You’ve eaten hearts, haven’t you, Hastur?’

Hastur couldn’t breathe – for all intents and purposes, he still could, and he hadn’t been discorporated (he doubted he would be), yet he felt no air catching in the bottom of his chest, nothing to carry the words out of his mouth.

‘You’re refusing to answer to me now?’

Silence.

‘Open your wings, Hastur.’

‘Wrench them out of me yourself. Wouldn’t it hurt me more?’

They were bluffing, Hastur was sure of it, sure of it enough to call them out. Still, his wings (or what was left of them) remained tucked neatly into his shoulders, the muscles in his back tensing around the openings as Beelzebub drifted a hand down the ridges of his spine.

‘It was a test of your obedience, Hastur. And you’ve failed.’

Hastur rolled his eyes, a dangerous move considering he had no idea how well Beelzebub could perceive in darkness like this.

‘You wouldn’t.’

‘I would. But first – ‘ Beelzebub dragged out, thrusting the organ to Hastur’s lips. Right under his nose, he could smell it, the metallic and slightly rotten scent, all too well. It was his; right before him sat a piece of him, passively beating in the hands of someone with enough abandon to rip it into slivers and cast it around Hell like celebratory confetti. ‘Bite down, Duke of Hell.’

He pinched his lips inwards between his teeth, the sharpness of the bones grating along the flesh. He shook his head, humming disagreeably.

‘This isn’t your first heart.’

He wished he could argue back. No, of course it wasn’t his first, but it was his first time cannibalising himself. It was a little harder to coax out of him than, say, ripping it out of a monk and swallowing it whole.

It felt as if they squatted down before him as their elbows pressed like pins into his knees. ‘Are you being polite? You’ve gotten quite adept at that, lately.’

Hastur rolled each possible meaning of ‘being polite’ through his head. It would certainly seem polite not to chow down on his own organs to just about anyone on Earth, but Beelzebub was diametrically opposed to the customs of Earthly courtesy.

‘Letting your Prince eat first. Very kind,’ they sung inharmoniously, the light in the chamber flooding back with a snap of their fingers. With unhinged jaws to rival that of a snake, Beelzebub threw open their mouth to reveal a cavern overcrowded with sharp teeth, closing it around the narrow end of the heart. Blood gushed like geysers from the heart, splattering onto Hastur’s head, dribbling from his forehead down the length of his nose and catching on his lips.

That’s what they meant.

Hastur couldn’t keep it together much longer as his own blood crept into the corners of his eyes, threading onto the tear ducts and sliding down his face as human tears would. It was degrading. Most of all, it was disgusting, as greater volumes of blood jumped from the heart, prompted by Beelzebub’s fervent squeezing, and ran down his face in thin streams until there was too much of the iron-y fluid sitting atop his mouth. It begged to be let in, to go somewhere. The strain was too much. Hastur opened his mouth to let the blood free, only to have his own innards stuffed into his mouth in its entirety. It sat inertly on his tongue, forcing his jaw open excruciatingly wide.

‘Now eat.’

There was no other way. He rolled the organ forward to his teeth with a flex of his tongue, forcing them through the thick muscle and chewy arteries. Eventually, one burst, filling his mouth with not only the whole heart, but what felt like the entire volume of his body’s blood content. He gagged and spluttered and choked as it lodged further down his throat, the flavour of metal swilling over each of his taste buds enhancing the misery. Hastur, though it felt implausible, could further open his mouth to allow some of the liquid to waterfall out and onto his naked body. He hadn’t looked down until he wanted to see where all of this excess blood was pooling – and when he did, he was met with the sight of a rod of steel which glowed a pale yellow nearing the hole in his chest.

He tried to scream but only a low, pathetic whine could emit for the obstruction in his throat. Hastur forced himself to forget the pain of the metal wire boring into his wrists and tried to get the chair to jump backwards, away from the heat of the poker.

All that his thrashing accomplished was jerking his body at just the right angle to let the poker hit the sides of the hole. Within seconds, the parts of his body that weren’t the skin immediate to the cavern numbed and tingled, almost as if they’d leant their nerve endings to this particular area to maximise the hurt.

He swore and gnarled and howled and shrieked and eventually just croaked. Beelzebub laughed at his weakening fervour, prodding the rod in a little deeper to make a connection with various other organs that Hastur couldn’t name. For once in his life, there were no words in his head, no images or shapes, or even simple things, like colour. As his body slumped down in the chair, the weight of his shoulders and head crunching around the singed hole, he vaguely felt his head loll to the side as he vomited down the length of his body.

‘Grim,’ Beelzebub commented with a juvenile disgust. They kept laughing, though; truthfully, more of an uncomfortable snickering, like she wasn’t used to the sensation of laughter.

Hastur wanted to scream again, but scream _at_ Beelzebub, really give her everything he had. But he couldn’t. All that came out was panting and coughing as he spluttered out the remainder of the blood and any flecks of muscle left underneath his tongue. He hadn’t registered until now that the heart was gone. He opened his eyes, which felt gritty for the blood still entrapped in the tear ducts. The poker was discarded on the floor by the prince’s feet, cooling to a faint red. They kicked it across the room where it ricocheted off the base of a guillotine and clattered to a stop against the leg of a confused-looking contraption with chains criss-crossing all over the place. Had he the energy, Hastur would’ve laughed, or at least snorted, at the over-complication of torture. 5000 years ago, when Hell’s idea of great pain and suffering was still fairly primitive, the methods used were effective enough in their own right. He couldn’t understand the need for such modernity. Really, the greatest punishment of them all was one that had happened by nature, hands-free, and no interference needed: making him, the Angel of Benevolence, one of the cruellest, merciless, misanthropic demons in all of Hell. That was real cruelty, the cruelty of irony and self-betrayal.

Of course, most of the coherence of these thoughts were comprised after the fact, as all that went through Hastur’s mind in the moment was, alternatingly, nothing, or low-frequency, incoherent babbling (which he would later pick over as his thoughts and critiques).

Nothing happened for a while. Beelzebub paced the room, fiddling with components of machinery or picking up loose parts. They seemed dissatisfied with it all; not to mention a little on edge, considering they were lumbered with torturing a demon while you-know-what hung over their head like a pall. Hastur thought that the impending battle would’ve curbed their enthusiasm, or at least distracted them from the direst cruelty – but then again, what was a demon if not permanently excited for a good sorting-out?

The anticipation was wild. Beelzebub hadn’t stepped near him in what certainly felt like longer than the remaining minutes till the end of the world. Maybe it had ended around them, and Hastur was doomed to an eternity of obliviousness. He considered this (or, babbled incoherently about it in his mind), until Beelzebub stopped ramrod straight and spun on their heel to look Hastur dead in the eye. Something about their demeanour had changed.

Until now, Beelzebub hadn’t given the aura of true rage, only a heavy dose of betrayal mostly masked by sadistic enthralment – Hastur could easily pick up on these emotions. But now, just like the shockwave of Ligur’s anger right before the Fall, it blew him away. It was possibly even stronger than that, as Hastur had grown accustomed to strong feelings of odium during his time in the Underworld.

‘What is it, Lord Beelzebub?’

‘What’re you feeling?’

Well, pain, Hastur thought, but could only produce a faint ‘what?’

‘Your aura. It’s off. It was off when I collected you; it’s been off this whole time but I hadn’t thought anything of it.’

‘What the Heaven do you mean? You’re mad.’

‘I’m mad? I’m not the one laying down with a _human._ ’

‘And I’m not the one laying down with an _angel_.’

Beelzebub raised a finger in warning. ‘How the _fuck –_ ‘

‘You told me to come to your office.’

Their face fell in realisation. ‘Oh, Satan…’

Hastur nodded, briefly satisfied that he had the upper hand, if only for a second.

Beelzebub’s face hardened. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. It means nothing.’

Hastur thought back to his first night with Laoise. That’s what he’d told himself then, too.

‘That! There it is again!’

‘What is?’

‘The aura. It’s wrong, it’s out of step for a demon.’

‘Do you know what it is?’ Hastur probed, genuinely curious. ‘Because I don’t.’

Beelzebub let go of a long-held breath. They smiled tightly at Hastur, hands folded behind their back as they crept closer to the chair.

‘I’m still interested in your wings.’

Hastur couldn’t fathom why they were dodging the question after being so invigorated about it. He craned his neck up at her, shaking his head. He no longer had the brief confidence he’d just gotten, now reverting to a pitiable pleading. He knew that Beelzebub was tired of the dance, tired enough to take matters into their own hands. So, this time, when their hand tapped down the length of his back like an insect, Hastur knew there was no bluff to call.

They brought their other hand to his back, both of them digging their fingers into the scars detailing his shoulder blades. Hastur gasped as the flesh was pulled away, fingers unravelling the stumps of wings. They still reached the floor, and stroked up to the ceiling, but did not extend width-ways.

He could feel his wings, but they were invisible to him. The pain of extending the limbs out of his back was near unbearable as the cold air of the room bit the stumps where the rest of his primaries should be, and the auxiliaries. He hissed, not sure if the memory or the reality made him angrier. Out of his control, the wings tried to flap, or at least flex upwards and downwards, but all they could manage was a sorry twitch in either direction, shooting the pain further into his back.

‘Really did a number on you, didn’t they?’

Hastur thought of the wings that remained attached but were ripped in half and could never grow back properly. He thought of the pain and the blood that had exuded from the spaces where the feathers were ripped off by the handful. And then he remembered who’d done it.

‘It was him,’ Hastur barely managed to say with enough conviction. He was breathing out the words, supressing the screams that wanted to go along with them. ‘It was your stupid little hook-up. Can you truly justify _this_?’

Hastur finally screamed as he gained enough autonomy over his wings to project them towards Beelzebub, but of course they hadn’t the reach.

‘He didn’t have to do this much. No other demon has wings this bad. It wasn’t even in the moment; he thought about it, it was calculated. He had me in a headlock with the sword and just _ripped_ and _ripped_ and – ‘

‘ _Zzilence_.’

The blood in his eyes came loose again and began to drip.

‘Do you not care, Beelzebub? Do you not care about the rest of us at all?’

‘Of cours _zz_ e I care. I have an army to go mobilis _zz_ e and instead I’m stuck here with a _traitor_.’

‘If you cared you wouldn’t fraternize – ‘

‘The same goes for you, then.’

‘The humans never did anything wrong, honest. Not wrong like this,’ Hastur said, gesturing a final time to his wings with a tilt of his head.

Beelzebub shook their head. ‘You’re far out of line, Duke Hastur. You’re so beyond reason you can’t even s _zz_ ee it.’

They stepped forward once more and ran a finger along the remainder of his wings. The sensitivity of the stubs of feathers was enormous, like touching an open wound.

‘Please, don’t.’

Before he could finish his curt plea, a small hand had wrapped around the largest concentration of remaining feathers and tore them out. The blood trickled from the places they once sat, now almost an empty wing, the ribbons of red sliding down his back like fingernails.

‘What the Heaven is wrong with you? Oh, you _bitch_. Just like your bloody useless hook-up…mindless destruction. You don’t even _care_ …’ Hastur blathered, folding at the waist as far as he could as he gritted out shriek after shriek.

A hand slapped down on his forehead, yanking him straight again.

‘He is not a _hook-up_ \- ’

‘It’s more than that, then.’

‘You said it didn’t mean anything - ’

‘I’m a demon you imbecile, we _lie_ for a living - ’

Their voices overlapped, each accusing the other of things neither of them particularly understood.

‘I doubt you – what’s the human word for it? – love. You don’t even love him. You just like the power - ’

‘Bull _shit_ Hastur! I’ve learnt love and I can feel love and _that’s_ what you’re feeling and it fucking disgus _zz_ t _zz_ me.’

‘Love?’

Demons weren’t supposed to feel that. It was taken away from them, standing forever in the shadow of the angels, the shadows that shielded them from God’s love and the subsequent love She’d imbued in all of humanity.

‘How – how did you do that? That’s impossible, if anyone’s the traitor… it’s you.’

Beelzebub poised their other hand over the left wing, curling more feathers in their grip. ‘Did you not listen to me? I said that you feel it too.’

‘How? How did we - ’

They shrugged harshly. ‘Well, I don’t know, human-fucker, how did you?’

‘That… well…’

‘Mm,’ Beelzebub huffed, letting go of the wing. ‘It’s not so bad for you, truthfully. I got mine straight from the source.’ They side-eyed Hastur. ‘Don’t think I don’t hate it.’

‘I hadn’t even noticed mine.’

‘Yeah, you don’t, until someone that knows it intrinsically points it out. You know, I’ve felt it coming off of the demon Crowley before, but I reckon that’s just being amongst the scurge for so long.’

Hastur knew better than to mention Aziraphale, which is almost certainly where it had come from. Beelzebub’s sympathy for betrayal obviously didn’t extend past themselves. He also relished, just a little bit, in knowing something Beelzebub didn’t.

Beelzebub didn’t say anything more. Hastur sat, being accosted by pain from his back and his chest, as well as the smell of burnt flesh ( _a burnt body doesn’t leave you_ , he’d once heard one of those supposed witches from the 1600s scream as she was dragged to the stake). His stomach groaned, reminding him of the fact that his heart was back in his body, but mangled up and floating in a pool of stomach acid, so not quite the homecoming it needed, nor deserved. It wouldn’t matter soon, he thought. If Hell won, he’d just be tortured until he could never re-corporate; and if Hell lost, well, it _really_ wouldn’t matter then.

Beelzebub murmured to themselves in the old language, the language they spoke before humans evolved their own. Hastur caught snippets, like _why the Heaven hasn’t it started yet?_ and _I swear if Crowley’s cocked this up, too_ …

Hastur swallowed down the answers. Again, it felt empowering to be more clued-up on Armageddon than one of the Princes, than all of them, actually, as well as everyone else in Hell.

He tried to put his wings away, but Beelzebub shot him a look.

‘Not yet. I want them open for when I get back, every bloody demon in this place in tow. Everyone gets a celebratory go on Hastur.’

He shrugged, wondering what the optics were of 10 million angels and 10 million demons winding up in the wrong location for Armageddon. Who would get an advantage off of it, if anyone? Depends on who got to wherever they needed to go the fastest.

‘Oh!’ Beelzebub cried, grabbing their stomach and stumbling backwards. ‘Something’s wrong, something’s _very_ wrong.’

‘My aura, still?’ Hastur offered, if a bit sarcastically.

‘No, you fool. Something with the boy. It’s… stopped. Armageddon stopped.’

Hastur straightened up to his full height for the first time in what felt like hours, but could only have really been a quarter of one. Oh, Crowley, you’ve finally done something right. In all of his incompetence, Hastur marvelled, he’s saved the fucking world.

‘Oh?’

Beelzebub glared at him. ‘Yes, and I’m certain that _you’ve_ got something to do with it.’

They wrapped a hand around his throat. ‘I will be back, once Armageddon’s s _zz_ tarted again. And I will find out what part you’ve had to play in this _zz_ , and your punishment will be _unfathomable_.’

With a final buzz, Beelzebub was gone, leaving Hastur entirely unattended, with all of Hell’s arsenal single-mindedly dedicating their time elsewhere.

Bad optics. _Very_ bad optics.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this has starting formatting bizarrely but I'm morbidly depressed and tired of looking at this so... sorry


	11. In Quintessence

They emerged from the tarmac into a world, which definitely had the feel of Armageddon, with its orange sky and gathering clouds. After brushing rubble and parts of the runway from their shoulders, they turned to where a tall figure stood next to them – Gabriel. He gave a soft smile, no matter how small, in response to their scowl. The two walked officiously towards the sight in front of them – seven humans, both Heaven and Hell’s traitors, and one Antichrist.

‘Lord Beelzebub,’ Crowley embellished, flapping his hands obsequiously.

‘Crowley, the traitor.’

‘That’s not a nice word,’ he said, but their attention was back on the children.

‘Which one of them is the Antichrist?’

Crowley tipped his head to a boy with hair covering half his face. That was the son of their Master. That was the son of their Master, who had just thwarted his father’s, actual Satan’s, Great Plan. He looked innocent, and scared.

Gabriel took over, waving a finger at the boy with a sterilised yet charismatic smile. ‘That one. Hi… Adam Young.’

Beelzebub walked forward with him, crowding the boy.

‘Young man,’ the angel continued, casting a look to the ground and flashing his eyes back up again, scrunching his face into a condescending gurn, one which Beelzebub knew well. ‘Armageddon must… restart. Right now. A temporary inconvenience cannot get in the way of the greater good.’

Beelzebub nodded their approval, elaborating through gritted teeth. ‘As to what it stands in the way of, that has yet to be decided.’

They chanced a look at Gabriel as they spoke, realising that no matter what, the ‘temporary inconvenience’ stood in the way of either their or Gabriel’s permanent demise and subsequent eternal separation. No more purgatory, no more underhand sexscapades.

Whatever. It didn’t matter. They were hereditary enemies. Hastur had just gotten into their head more than they’d intended when they’d walked into that torture chamber. The sex was a bit of fun to be had in the lull between battles.

That was all.

‘The battle must be decided now, boy. That is _zz_ your - ’ Beelzebub corrected their buzz. ‘That is your destiny. It is written. Now start. The war.’

Adam’s face continued to blank, even with the flash in Beelzebub’s eyes.

Eventually, he spoke, and in far more colloquial terms than either angel or demon would’ve guessed to come out of the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness.

‘You both want to end the world just to see whose gang is best?’

Gabriel took it in stride, laughing in the face of the Antichrist. ‘Obviously. It’s the Great Plan. It’s the entire reason for the creation of the Earth!’

Gabriel, Beelzebub decided, would not know how to speak to a child had he read an instruction manual. They put him out of his misery. 

‘I’ve got this,’ they assured as Gabriel dropped back in exasperation. ‘Adam. When this is all over you get to rule the world. Don’t you want to rule the world?’

This was sure to get through. Patronising tone and assumption of childhood fantasies – how could they fail?

‘No. It’s hard enough finding things for The Them to do every day. I’ve got all the world I want.

Oh, for the love of –

‘Well, you can’t just _refuse_ to be who you are,’ Gabriel said, no longer frustrated, but purely incredulous (a bold choice of words, considering he was in the presence of Aziraphale and Crowley, Olympic-grade refusers of who they are). ‘Your birth, your destiny. You’re part of the Great Plan.’

Beelzebub leaned back, tutting into the air. Trust the son of Satan, the original adversary and instigator of rebellion, to rebel. They pursed their lips, looking for another argument, until that fussy angel in the tartan bowtie stepped forward.

‘You keep talking about the Great Plan - ’

Gabriel and Beelzebub shared a look. Gabriel looked long-suffering, as if he’d been dealing with things like this for the past six millennia – and if Beelzebub’s relationship with Crowley was anything to go by, he had.

‘Aziraphale, maybe you should keep your mouth _shut_ ,’ Gabriel snapped, pinching his thumb and forefinger together. Oddly, the simple gesture made Beelzebub thing he wouldn’t be bad suited for Hell’s Head Office.

‘Right, but, one thing I’m not clear on – is that the _Ineffable_ Plan?’

*

The only thing that had been stopping Hastur from breaking out of his bindings, he discovered, was the inherent knowledge that he _couldn’t_ , not while Beelzebub was in the room, anyway. He spent a few moments in the eerie quiet of a well-used torture chamber, black blood of numerous other demons splattering up the steel-plated walls, before straining his wrists outwards and dissolving the wire. He nursed his wrists in each hand, healing the broken skin and drying the blood, before hazarding to stand. Even knowing that no-one would come to find him (it was doubtful that Beelzebub would give up on Armageddon that easily, they’d probably find a way to start it themselves) he felt exposed, standing naked in the room. He’d never felt ashamed or even aware of nudity, really, but something felt different now, like whatever knowledge he’d obtained had given him cause to give higher value to his corporeal form.

Enough of that, he thought, flourishing his hand up and down his body to procure a loose approximation of his clothing. He miscalculated the trench coat, instead fathoming a bright yellow mackintosh, which he discarded on the floor of the chamber before shouldering open the door – which hurt like a _motherfucker_. He was just glad to have his wings stashed back into himself, yet the hole in his chest had not been refilled. That would take far too much energy, and a bit of paperwork, though he doubted the need for paperwork at this time. He cast a final look into the room, his blood pooled around the chair, soaking into the feathers that had been thrown into it. The sight of them produced phantom pains down the length of his spine. Hastur shivered, and commenced his great escape.

*

Just what the Heaven was this angel talking about?

‘The _Great Plan_ , it is written: there shall be a world, and it shall last for 6000 years, to end in fire and flame,’ Beelzebub droned, trying to show Gabriel how he should’ve been handling angels like this all these years, dropping their eyes to Adam to really emphasise how drastically he was subverting the course of history.

‘Yes, yes, that sounds like the Great Plan – just wondering, is that the Ineffable Plan as well?’

He’d said it enough times with enough conviction that it finally drew Beelzebub and Gabriel’s attention. They turned their eyes away from the child, levelling them instead at Aziraphale, who was beginning to look rather desperate.

Crowley looked as if he were about to add on, to which Beelzebub directed a wary glare; Gabriel, however, was trying to salvage the appearance of his supposedly endless Ethereal Know-How.

‘Well, they’re the same thing,’ he scoffed, trying to spin Aziraphale into the pedantic idiot, but Beelzebub knew him too well for that.

‘Uhh - ’ came the guttural noise from the corner – Crowley, of course, Beelzebub thought. Who else made so many superfluous noises. ‘Well, it’d be a pity if you thought you were doing what the Great Plan said, but you were actually going directly against God’s Ineffable Plan.’

Beelzebub and Gabriel stared hard at their counterparts, who now appeared behind the boy like concerned parents, or perhaps more fittingly, angels and devils on his shoulders.

Gabriel spluttered. Crowley went on.

‘I mean everyone knows the Great Plan, yeah,’ he confirmed, surveying everyone’s faces. ‘But the Ineffable Plan, well, it’s Ineffable, isn’t it? By definition, we can’t know it.’

There it was. Crowley’s logic – confusing enough to make you question how much you knew about something to the point that you felt you couldn’t dispute it, though reasonable enough as to not _make_ you want to dispute it.

‘But… it is written…’ Beelzebub muttered, fly buzzing above them by way of extended stress.

Gabriel wasn’t quite so ready to lie down and take it. ‘God does _not_ play games with the Universe.’

‘Where’ve you been?’ Crowley shot back, verbalising what Beelzebub (and just about everyone else) was thinking, in and amongst all of the questions running through their head. They were drawn out of it as Gabriel lowered his rather emotive forefinger to Beelzebub’s shoulder, pointing them in the direction of the imposing steel bunker behind them.

‘Can we just…’

They wandered to what they thought was out of earshot, still dropping their voices for good measure. He strained his finger to the Heavens, struggling his words out, visibly flustered as Beelzebub hadn’t seen him since that out-of-character confession on the Terrace.

‘I’m gonna need to talk to… _Head Office._ ’ He bit his lip, looking despondently around himself. ‘How I’m supposed to get 10 million angels to stand down from their war-footing is just - ’ He curled his fingers and internalised a short scream. ‘It just doesn’t bear thinking about…’

His face was close to theirs. That didn’t bear thinking about, either.

Instead, they talked shop, doing their best to suppress the frustration of having someone you lo – someone you sleep with quite regularly and enjoy it quite a lot – that close to you while you can’t do anything about it. ‘You should try getting 10 million demons to put down their weapons and go back to work.’

They held each other’s stare in the silence.

Gabriel broke it.

‘Well, at least we know whose fault it is!’ He projected, turning his torso to grin quite aggressively at Crowley and Aziraphale, who smiled and waved back just as coyly.

The pair set upon Adam once more.

‘Young man… you were put on this Earth for one reason and one reason only,’ Gabriel explained with his hands. ‘To. End. It. You are a disobedient, little brat.’ He looked back at Beelzebub. ‘And I hope someone tells your father,’ he winked, earning the slightest clandestine nod.

‘Oh, they will,’ they buzzed, eyes still on Gabriel’s violet ones. Beelzebub had stolen them from Elizabeth Taylor for him, which of course he’d objected to, but only in principle. ‘And your father will _not_ be pleased.’

The two vanished into smoke, leaving the population of the airfield equally fearful and bemused.

*

This time, it was draughts with Virgil.

‘Nah, nah, nah. Dante’s not _here_. Of course he’s not _here._ Never got close. Fifth circle.’

‘Jesus, why?’ Laoise thought back to those cantos in The Inferno, and how unpleasant it had sounded. A river filled with shit? And it’s up to your eyeballs?

Virgil’s eyes popped. ‘Are you kidding? The whole Beatrice thing? Sullenness, my dear. Lust was a close second, because, you know…’

In that time, Virgil had captured most of her pieces. She’d never understand how he waxed poetic and worked the board at the same time. Giving up, she reclined back on her elbows, glaring once more at the sky, half hoping Hastur would descend again and take her back to Earth.

‘Do you think it’s happened by now? It’s been way more than 25 minutes.’

Virgil only shrugged, continuing to play without her. ‘Who knows. They might be slowing down time now. It’s all about psychological punishment down here.’

*

Hell was quite pleasant, a little cooler, even, without all those demons clogging up the hallways. Hastur had a free run – and getting out should be _easy_. Of course, this very thought jinxed the whole journey, if you were superstitious, which Hastur wasn’t.

He slipped through corridors, turning back on himself when he rounded a corner too zealously and found the odd Legion, standing idly, checking their watch. Hell was getting confused, Hastur could feel it. He pressed himself against the wall, peering down the length of the narrow hallway to glimpse any destitute demons who had split off from the main rally. It was clear. Hastur paced swiftly towards the door at the end of the hallway, knowing it led to the stairwell that went to the main offices. It wasn’t ideal, but hopefully they’d be too distracted to notice the rift opening up in one of the empty offices behind them. The overhead light flickered on and off with an electronic buzzing to rival the Lord of the Flies’. He still felt naked without the trench coat, and his whole body ached and burnt and the feeling of Beelzebub’s fingers in his wounds still stung through his nerves but he _had_ to keep moving.

Hastur reached the door, hand thrust down to the knob and ready to turn. He let himself listen to what was happening upstairs. Millions of voices all groaning, some shouting, demanding their war. Hastur didn’t blame them for wanting the stimulation, office work did grate on the mind after a while, and most of those sorry souls didn’t get the pleasure of a regular murder or arson. The yelling grew louder, louder, individual chants becoming more distinguished as he opened the door to the precarious metal staircase which wound around a rusted pole.

Armageddon hadn’t –

And then the floor shook. It shook so hard it knocked Hastur clean off his feet, and from where he lay he could see that a Legion at the other end of the corridor was sprawled across the ground too, clutching at his chest. From somewhere above, he heard thousands, _millions_ , more bodies dropping above him, a despondent screech carrying through Hell.

Satan was coming up.

*

‘Weren’t they odd.’

Any promise of normality was shattered as Crowley sunk to the ground, hand splayed desperately across his chest as what felt like an earthquake emerged from beneath them. They didn’t get earthquakes like this in England, just about everybody thought.

‘No, no, nonononono!’

‘What’s happening… I can feel something…’ Aziraphale fretted, not used to this sort of animosity affronting his celestial aura.

Crowley choked past the agony of the rage that had just been injected into his body, as well as every other demon, in the Infernal Kingdom or otherwise. ‘They did it. They told his father.’

‘Oh, no,’ he heard Aziraphale breath from where he lay pressed into the tarmac, mind racing through the certain end of the Earth, where there would be no winners: Heaven, Hell, Humanity, or otherwise. Maybe the cockroaches. There seemed to be a joke about cockroaches with God.

‘His Satanic father is _not_ happy,’ Crowley said, trying to rise to his feet again as the rumbling seemed to subside, only to be cast back down again.

‘Perhaps it’s a volcano,’ bike-girl’s apparent boyfriend suggested, obviously not believing his own words.

‘There’s no volcanoes in England,’ bike-girl explained. ‘It’s really angry, whatever it is. I can feel it.’

Well, she had that fact right. Satan’s rage was agonising.

‘And it’s getting closer.’

It was – the trembling of the earth grew more impassioned, nearly sending everybody onto the ground this time, but none were entrapped in Satan’s clutch as much as Crowley.

‘What’s happening?’ Somebody managed to shout above the fray.

Aziraphale levelled his tone. ‘Well, call me an old silly, but it looks like the Devil is coming. Satan himself.’

*

Limbo rattled. So did the other circles of Hell.

‘Christ, what was that?’ Laoise asked, clutching her heart.

The rest of the virtuous non-believers shrugged, and went back to their games.

*

The inane nattering of the people on the airbase would’ve done Crowley’s head in, if he could’ve spared a thought to listen to them. He was fixated on Aziraphale, who was looking at him expectantly, doe eyes frightened and panicked. It shattered Crowley.

‘Right. That was that. It was nice knowing you.’

‘We can’t give up now,’ Aziraphale said, because of course that was what he believed.

The humans grunted and stumbled around them.

‘This is Satan himself. This isn’t about Armageddon anymore, this is _personal_.’ Crowley found it in himself to say what he’d wanted to say for 11 years: ‘We are _FUCKED_!’

Aziraphale found it within himself to reunite with the sword he’d given away all those centuries ago. He wielded it behind him, still seemingly averse to possessing it. ‘Come up with something… or… or… or I’ll never talk to you again!’

Well, that settled it. With his heart in his throat, Crowley thrust his hands skyward, yelling in all the agony he’d felt for 6000 years.

*

Hell had gone back to work. Beelzebub sat in their office, ignoring call after call from Gabriel.

Hastur was wrong, they told themselves. If they _loved_ (not thought without a gag) Gabriel, then surely they would’ve wanted to stop Armageddon, too. That seemed to be the catalyst for such treacherous behaviour. Hastur with Laoise, Crowley with… whoever. They’d hate to guess.

Yes _zz_ , thought Beelzebub. I _don’t_ love him.

And then they went back to work, satisfied that the Antichrist was about to be destroyed, and soon everything would be in its right place.

*

Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, _shit_.

Demons stomped and chattered all above him. Something was definitely off. They must’ve figured it out, as they’d stood down and gone back to work – but Satan was up on Earth. None of this followed…

There was no room to leave now, no room to escape. As the Legion down the hallway came to, Hastur slid from the stairwell, cramped into a dead end.

‘Wonder what just happened…’ the Legion could be heard asking himself as he drew closer to the stairs. Go back to work, go back to work, Hastur willed, shrinking himself back into the shadows as he was so apt at doing. If the Legion spotted him and asked questions, he could always discorporate him to buy some time.

The demon stopped by the door and gave a final look behind him, humming to himself. He didn’t stick around much longer as he shrugged, pulled open the door, and disappeared behind it. Hastur sighed in relief. He appeared to be alone in the basements of Hell. He caught his breath before trying to proceed along the path he’d originally chosen, the hallway that would take him to the boiler room with the incognito backdoor that didn’t register on the quotas – the backdoor of backdoors.

It was a good thing he had – he heard two voices that he recognised instantly, Abaddon and Dagon.

‘Hastur’s gone. I just checked the chamber,’ Dagon warbled.

‘Mm. Surprise, surprise. Beelzebub must’ve forgotten the binding spells. Strange cock-up for them.’

‘I’d sooner find Crowley. I think he’s done much, _much_ worse than Duke Hastur.’

‘If we can really call him a Duke – can you smell that?’

‘Smell what?’

‘Mm. I don’t know. Burning… fear,’ Abaddon approximated, eventually grumbling in defeat.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Dagon spat, the sound of a heavy door creaking open and shut on its hinges accompanied by the tapping of four feet echoing through the air.

Hastur didn’t breathe. He slumped down in his corner, folding his hands over his head. This whole grand-exit thing was looking less and less likely. How long could he go before some demon needed to take a breather and came to hash it out down here? They’d probably take to the dead end… the rest of the corridors were open spaces, no alcoves to duck into if he really ran into trouble.

Well, he’d thrown Abaddon off, which was something – maybe the distraction of 6000 years of preparation crumbling out of sight was enough to dilute the curiosity of the demons.

Hastur was torn between continuing with the mental affirmations and reassurances, and quieting his mind all together. No, there was just too much to consider. He had to listen out for people on the stairwell, people emerging from the offices down here… oh, what a bloody mess. He wished he hadn’t bothered with the whole stealth and subtlety thing; it was a stupid idea he’d picked up from some moving picture that was playing mutedly on Laoise’s television one time. That bloke had gotten out of his situation with little chance of being apprehended. Hastur wished humans were more honest with themselves about these things.

He slid back up against the wall, taking stiff steps towards the opening. The footsteps were still prominent from above, but nothing sounded any closer than that. The first task really was to get out of the vicinity of the stairwell.

Hastur bit the bullet (figuratively, he might add. He thought modern weaponry to be tactless and impersonal), and bolted down the corridor until he reached the corner he’d been foiled at last time round.

No Legion in sight. No Lords, no Princes. No nothing. Hastur kept moving.

*

‘Lord Beelzebub,’ Dagon announced, bursting through the door to the office without knocking – just about the only demon in Hell that could do that without having their throat ripped out with a stapler.

‘What? What is it?’

Beelzebub put the phone receiver under the desk, clamped between their legs.

_Hello?_ Gabriel’s voice projected from between her legs (not for the first time, mind). They finally pulled themselves into their desk, hands folded beneath their chin, staring at Dagon almost obediently. Dagon looked sceptically around the office, hand still pressing the door open. Behind her, Abaddon.

‘Duke Hastur’s gone.’

Beelzebub flashed her eyes at the phone and it hung up. On the other end of the line, in an equally lavish office upstairs, though luxurious in a more Heavenly and graceful way, a certain archangel was left high and dry, legs shaking as he slammed his fist against the desk in frustration.

‘Fine. He’s still here, I know it. I’ll shut off the exits, that should do for now. We have bigger fish to fry,’ they explained, nodding Dagon out of the office and preparing to make a few… not-so-above-board calls to upstairs, for certain supplies pertaining to the trial of a traitor.

*

Back in the lull between Heaven and Hell, Satan himself was rising through the runway, pounding his fists against the floor and sending the shockwave through the wreckage of his Great Plan. He stopped rising at his waist, his wings opening out and casting shadows darker than that of any cloud. He wore a crown of coal-black horns, sharp teeth bared as he roared at the gathered people beneath him. He knew one of them as his own, and another that he’d begotten.

_Human incarnate_ , was all that went through Crowley’s head. That’s all he ever wanted to be, and if this went anywhere near according to plan (unlikely), then maybe that’s what he could be. The sight of his Master grizzling and flapping his torn wings made that feeling grow ever stronger. That’s not what he was.

‘Where is my son?’ He found Adam. ‘You. You’re my rebellious son? Come here.’

Adam fell forward. In the corner of Crowley’s eye, he saw Aziraphale shift and stumble, a fire blazing beside him. It looked unnatural, Aziraphale clutching or wielding anything that was a tool of Heaven’s. Human incarnate.

‘You’re not my dad,’ Adam said simply. ‘If I’m in trouble with my dad, then it won’t be _you_.’

Satan cracked the earth again, but weaker this time.

‘What did you say?’

Angel and demon spurred him on. Adam said it again, and again, and again.

Wrapped in the smoke of his own disintegrated flesh, Satan crumbled into the earth.

The sky looked a little brighter.

*

‘Fold!’

Laoise shot up in bed, pushing sweaty strands of hair out of her face. She checked the time – it was quarter past six in the evening. Her throat was sore, and she had an innate knowledge of Ancient Greek.


	12. This Must Be The Place

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the finalé :)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this has been finished since the end of May and I've /finally/ gotten around to putting the whole thing up! thank you to my readership <3

It felt like an eternity to reach the boiler-room. The usual guards hadn’t reclaimed their stations yet, and Hastur was thankful for the continued unrest. With a final surveillance, Hastur pushed through the heavy door, the handle about 200 degrees hotter than the usual air in Hell.

He was instantly affronted by a gust of humid air, making him choke. He loosened his tie further, but hesitated to unbutton any more of the shirt, and it already exposed half of his chest. Hastur still felt the pressing need for modesty, which he couldn’t quite reconcile, despite not being able to push it away, either.

This was it – he was getting out of Hell, and Armageddon had been stopped. The crushing pull of fury in his chest had subsided, so Satan had either calmed down, or been otherwise disarmed. Things were going quite well, Hastur thought, considering the powers that converged during this being quite cantankerous and stubborn.

He gestured. Nothing happened. He snapped his fingers. Still no rift. He tried with his eyes, something he’d never gotten quite apt at. Nothing.

Oh, _fuck_.

‘ _BEELZEBUB!’_ He shrieked, momentarily forgetting himself and the whole concept of... _not_ getting caught. Hastur slapped a hand over his mouth, which twitched and trembled with agitation and dread. Do not bite it, do not bite it, do not bite it –

The pipes creaked and the boiler hissed. Things were getting back to normal upstairs, and soon that normalcy would trickle down to the basement, and he’d be truly trapped then.

Fruitlessly, he tried opening the backdoor. Nothing. Hot, empty air. It was suffocating.

In a pre-emptory attempt at concealing himself, he sat himself awkwardly in the space between the huge boiler and the wall. He hit his head back against the wall, his blond hair he’d somehow managed to keep on during all of this adhering to the prickly texture of the bricks. He was never leaving Hell, he told himself, though he was more concerned with how long it’d take Head Office to settle the score with Crowley before the hatchet came down on _his_ neck.

Hastur had one more thing to try. He clenched his body and tried to picture Limbo – again, he wasn’t getting anywhere. Every exit from Hell was sealed off. Though he wouldn’t let himself think the exact words, for fear of giving them too much weight, he concluded that Laoise was out of his grasp for good – or however long he might have left.

He smacked the rusted side of the boiler with an open palm, the twist of his torso further tearing apart the gaping cavern in his chest.

*

Hastur must’ve dozed off, as he was stirred back to attention with the sound of numerous, countless pairs of feet shuffling and adjusting in the room above him – the room where demons gathered for Hell-wide events. He rose up to get closer to the ceiling, trying to hear even a murmur of what was happening. Were they mobilising again? Gathering to find him?

In the midst of his speculation, a great cheering moan erupted. They were being invigorated, whatever it was. They were being spurred into action, and whatever was being decided, they seemed to agree.

The stomping picked up – they were getting excited. Hastur thought he could hear sporadic commands of _do it!_ and _traitor!_ followed by a collective groan of _guiltyyy_ …

It was hard to deny what was going on up there. Hastur deflated. With the verdict decided, there couldn’t be much of a trial left to be had – so his head was effectively on the chopping block.

There was a shuffle from above, as all the feet took a step to Hastur’s left. He stared resolutely at the ceiling, trying to determine if they were leaving the gallery. They remained where they had jumped back to. Had Crowley been killed? He doubted that demons would recoil from even the most grotesque of tortures or annihilations.

He strained his ears more, only hearing the usual low-level grunting and squawking you get at those things – the less refined demon’s version of noises of pleasure and approval. It was frustratingly silent for the next few beats, no movement, no cheering. Until there was widespread gasping and screeching.

Those were _not_ any sort of noise of pleasure.

*

It was now Sunday, and the timeframe for Armageddon had long passed. The world went on as it did, perhaps with the feel of settling dust, but Laoise reasoned that it probably only felt that way from her perspective. She phoned her mother, who did not give any indication that she’d thought Laoise dead, and nor did her friends.

Well, that was that. Everything back in its right place – nearly.

Laoise tried calling the bookshop. Then she tried Crowley. And then Crowley’s other line. She even tried summoning Hastur. Radio silence, all of them. She told herself that they were probably just getting lightly reprimanded for their subversion of the apocalypse, the sort of ‘don’t do it again now on your way’ that you got from you boss. Realistically, she knew that they were probably in a great deal more trouble than Earthly incompetence, and on that note, she tried _very_ desperately not to think about the fact that Hastur had said they were coming for him, too.

She went on about her usual days, finding herself thinking about Limbo a lot harder than her pre-death-self expected she might. Again, she considered the possibility of a dream, but the pain of her final moment and the learning of a whole new language weren’t generally things you were granted in your dreamscape. Laoise made a coffee and put it in a thermos, and then set out to visit the bookshop in person.

The end of summer was drawing near and the tourists and children in London were savouring their last days of expensive industry and freedom from obligation. The morning sky was deep orange but the air wasn’t warm, not even close. Streets seemed busier than usual, not that she minded, for little, human problems in this world were infinitely palatable when juxtaposed to all other options. Yeah. This place wasn’t so bad.

As she rounded the corner to the bookshop, reminded both of the day she’d seen Hastur again and the day she found out about Armageddon, she converged with Aziraphale. He looked tired and worn, very much not his usual self. Overcome with relief, she bounded down the street, weaving through pedestrians and calling his name. She pulled him into a hug before he could open the door to his store, not even registering him tense up at her touch.

‘You did it. You all did it.’

He held her back, but with little conviction. ‘Yep.’

‘What’s wrong?’ She whipped her head around, checking for signs that this world wasn’t the real one. ‘Is this all an illusion? Am I still dead?’

‘No, no. This is real, everything’s… fine.’

This wasn’t the usual Aziraphale. She couldn’t pinpoint what exactly was off – how he walked, his cadence of voice, even the look of his face was slightly different. She supposed going through the end of the world probably did things to you, and she likely didn’t look much better herself.

He pushed the door open and extended a hand to show her in, which she obliged. The angel stooped around the store with a frown on his face, perusing each bookshelf and individual spine.

‘What’re you looking for?’

‘The shop burnt down yesterday.’

‘Well, I was murdered on Thursday, and here I am. What’s with that, by the way?’

He snapped his head towards her. ‘Anything destroyed under the blanket of Armageddon got restored by the Antichrist.’

‘Oh. That was considerate of him.’

‘Yes, quite. I wonder if the Bentley’s okay…’

‘What happened to it? Crowley must’ve been devastated.’

Aziraphale gave a knowing smile, though a little pained. ‘Oh, he was alright. Drove it right through the ring of fire on the M25.’

Her jaw slackened. Aziraphale chuckled. ‘Yes, you’ve missed a lot.’

‘Sounds it. Doesn’t really matter now, though, right?’

Aziraphale nodded but his expression betrayed any certainty. She didn’t want to press it.

‘I know he’s not really your department, but do you know where Hastur is?’

The angel couldn’t meet her gaze. He continued to potter around the bookshop, but without the same care and attentiveness she’d seen before; it was more of a casual browse, like he wasn’t entirely interested in his surroundings.

‘We – I mean, he and Crowley drove here yesterday. When Crowley got back to the car, he was gone.’ Aziraphale turned back around. ‘Not to worry you, but I imagine he’s been dragged to Hell.’

She couldn’t keep upright. ‘How – how bad is that?’ She kicked herself. What a stupid question. She thought of the scars and the burn and his insecurity over his wings and wanted to – nay, _needed_ – to vomit.

Aziraphale’s face broke into a grin. ‘Oh, probably not so bad. Beelzebub was on the airfield and Hell’s army was otherwise occupied. I imagine he’s free. He’s not exactly Hell’s most wanted…’

The last sentence was obviously meant for the angel’s ears only, and she decided again to not press. She took the assurance at face value, deciding that the angel probably knew enough about the inner workings of Hell as well as Heaven to be trustworthy.

‘I’m off to meet Crowley at St. James’. Fancy a trip?’

‘It’d be rude not to.’

Crowley ordered a strawberry popsicle, a vanilla cone with a flake, and mint ice cream. He was smilier than usual, and told the vendor to keep the change. Laoise was growing ever sceptical. Is that what happened to angels and demons when they defeated God’s plan, and defected from either side? She didn’t mind terribly, as the pair seemed to be talking more openly than they’d been able to in 6000 years. She hung behind quietly, as if only an observer, taking the occasional lick from her cone.

Just as the trio were to take their first bites of their treats, Aziraphale was gagged and bound faster than Laoise or Crowley could do anything about it. They stood frozen, stunned, as Aziraphale screamed through the cloth gag.

Laoise stared desperately at Crowley, who only had his eyes fixated on the angel. She wanted to scream for him to do something, anything – this couldn’t be happening again. There was no getting through to him. That was, until his focus was decimated by a crowbar cascading down upon his red hair, throwing him onto the floor.

‘Bad luck, dear,’ one of the figures surrounding Laoise crooned, kicking Crowley’s side. Though it felt wrong, she stepped back out of the demons’ field of vision, listening to them chatter inarticulately. Was she really stepping out of the line of fire, foregoing the chance to save one of her friends? Apparently so, but nothing she could do could will her to interfere.

‘It’s all good – it’s tickety-boo,’ Crowley choked, eventually collapsing to the pavement and dissolving into the ground along with his apprehenders. Laoise disposed of her ice cream, subjecting herself to the knowledge that all was not as simple as it seemed when it came to Heaven and Hell, the very places that ruled and constrained humanity. She walked home, every inch of her body feeling the emptiness and loss of her three friends – one of them creating a larger void than the others, a space carved out so quickly that it felt impossible to replace.

*

The footfall dispersed reluctantly, only a few at a time away from the ceiling. Eventually more and more fell away, spurred on by a loud bang and shouting so loud it could’ve only have been one of the princes. Not quite committed to the action, he fruitlessly tried to open the backdoor again, wondering if the restriction had been eased after the trial.

Hastur and Crowley had never gotten on much – different principles, not that Hastur really had any. Different worldviews. Crowley, he thought, was always a little bit weird. Yet Hastur still deflated and felt a personal sort of defeat knowing that he was gone, destroyed in whatever way they might’ve chosen for him.

‘Couldn’t have been much better than this,’ Hastur said aloud slipping his frozen fingertips in between the opening of his shirt, cringing at the way he could stroke the bones and poke a finger at the organs. He still couldn’t find it in himself to repair the body, and he didn’t dare try for he feared the disappointment of having that ability stripped from him, too. He removed his hand and let it rest above his clothing, the blanche cotton stained with red. The Duke – though, as Abaddon had fairly pointed out, he wasn’t sure how comfortable he felt in the cloak of that title anymore – only had his thoughts, and the only thought he had was: how long is there?

Then, pounding footsteps, fast and urgent, right toward the boiler-room door and reverberating around the cramped dead-end. Hastur nearly flew into hysterics but levelled himself, finding that a better use of his energy would be to spend it stowing himself away behind the boiler again. As soon as he’d hit the floor, the clang of steel on steel shuddered through the room, and the dim, grey light of the hallways crept in.

This was a bloody stupid place to hide, he thought bitterly at the sensation of his muscles aching swam through him as he tried to fold his long frame up into the small square of space. He pulled his knees into his chest, his feet almost sliding out from beneath him with the shift. Whoever’s lurking at the door can definitely see me. There’s no doubt.

‘Hastur?’

The voice was a whisper, more of a hiss into the darkness. It wasn’t commanding or accusatory. It was scared and feeble.

‘Duke Hastur, it’s me.’

Hastur squeezed himself into his pocket of space even tighter. This had to be a trick. Somebody was in his corporation. Nobody survived trial by Hell if they weren’t meant to.

The boiler jolted and clanked. Hastur’s mind travelled back to each time he’d stood under a burst pipe and did the very unfit-for-a-Duke job of collecting the depressing green fluid that slugged out of it.

‘Please, come on. I’m getting you out of here and they already think I’m gone. We don’t have a spectacular amount of time.’

Hastur thought about this. There was a thing he’d heard of called Pascal’s Wager. If he stepped out from the spot and Crowley, somehow, _was_ Crowley, then everything was fine. If he stepped out, and it wasn’t, then he was only speeding up the inevitable. There’re two more options, but Hastur didn’t have the time to put so many words together in his head as he squeezed his eyes shut and hauled himself to his feet.

He stood next to the boiler, facing Crowley head on. He had an odd, chlorinated scent, and water dripped from his fingers onto the floor. Hastur staggered backwards.

‘Is that – is that - ’

Crowley wiped his hands on the blazer, spreading his hands in the air to show their dryness.

‘Yes, it was. I really don’t have much time to explain.’

‘How are you not dead?’

‘Hastur, please, I really haven’t – ’

Hastur stepped back further, shaking his head. ‘You aren’t the snake. He doesn’t speak so…’

‘So like a pansy? Yes, Hastur, I’ve very well been told.’

‘Who are you?’

Crowley threw his hands in the air. ‘Oh, for the love of – it’s me, Aziraphale.’

‘Wankwings!’

‘Keep your voice down, you fiend. I’m here to get you out. Crowley told me I was to at least _try_ before I left myself.’

Hastur looked at the floor, then back at Crowley – Aziraphale – and tried painstakingly to form words. His jaw trembled. ‘Is that why you’re still here? What did they do?’

‘Really, I thought you were quicker than this. Holy Water. I knew it, Crowley knew it. Currently, he’s in Heaven, surviving Hellfire on my behalf,’ Aziraphale rushed out, continuously looking over his shoulder, should anyone have found the pair of invalids. ‘Truly, Hastur – oh it’s so nice to speak like myself again. You know, I rather like the fit of this jacket – forgive me, I’m getting a bit beside myself. We must go at _once_.’

‘Aziraphale,’ Hastur said, pushing down a faint memory of the war conjured by the name, ‘they’ve closed the exits. There’s no chance you’re getting me out the front.’

Aziraphale gestured, and a bright light shot the space between the two.

‘Can’t embargo Grace.’

The two converged in front of the glowing white, Aziraphale holding out a bony elbow for Hastur to take, which was just as swiftly smacked away. They stepped into the light just as alarms rang through Hell, footsteps charging down the stairs and corridors bickering and guffawing about Heavenly presence and the like. Hastur was already deposited safely on the steps of the Embassy of Lithuania when they reached the boiler-room.

*

She stood in the foyer of the Tate, hands clasped in front of her thighs, resisting the urge to straighten her hair or her blazer once more. She swallowed, running her opening gambit for the interview in her head.

_I’ve relied on art for years… it’s gotten me through so many rough patches… for instance, I recently lost my job, and my boyfriend, and some friends…_

Jesus, what am I thinking? I can’t talk about them right now, she thought as she blinked away tears. She’d seen Crowley and Aziraphale dragged to certain death, and that didn’t bode well for Hastur’s fate. She felt naïve for believing Aziraphale’s promise of her demon’s safety. What could she have done, though? The worst had probably already happened.

Laoise conceded to her whims and wiped at her eyes, feeling the wetness on her cheeks and finding it very unprofessional. She needed this job. She needed a way out of this existential torment.

Checking her watch, she found herself to be half an hour early, so she wandered around the ground floor exhibitions with the aid of one of the glossy maps. She was drawn to the abstract modern series, docilely loitering in a room with white walls and light wooden flooring, capitalised enamel messages swirling all around her.

There was a heavy breeze, and a feeling that took control of her immediately. It drew out more unwanted emotion and she pinched her wrists, just above the purpling veins, disciplining herself into a blank expression and empty head. She made room for the body that had walked up beside her, not daring to give them any recognition lest they see her tear-streaked face. They cleared their throat, and tapped her shoulder eagerly.

She looked up. Looking back down, as tall and lofty as she remembered, was a black-eyed demon, possibly even more withered than before, but still smiling down at her.

‘Oh, Hastur - ’ she squeaked, her body falling into his own. He squeezed her around the shoulders a touch too tight, but it’s the reminder she needed that he was real, he was there, and she had him.

The pair said nothing about the past few days. It wouldn’t be fair on either one to pry. Hastur did offer that Crowley and Aziraphale were fine, but in an offhanded way.

Hastur looked at the art with her, peering at all of the words that swarm the walls. She squinted and saw the name of the artist that created one that stands out in particular, one which seems to have grabbed Hastur’s interest. Christopher Wool, 1997.

Hastur read the words slowly. ‘You Make Me,’ he enunciates tilting his head. ‘I make you what?’

‘No, not like that. It means you complete me – I mean, that’s what the person who made the sign meant, anyway.’

‘Oh,’ he said simply. ‘Do I make you?’

Laoise spluttered. ‘Oh – I … yes.’ She figured it was pointless to lie. Things could slip away so quickly. ‘You do.’

Hastur said nothing, only staring at each thick, black line that comprised the words.

‘Do I make you?’ Laoise returned.

‘Yes, I rather think you do.’


End file.
